ESPN's Memo on Social Networking: Smells Like They're Cooking Up Some Changes
The kind folks at ESPN PR just passed along - without us even asking! - ESPN's ‘additional guidelines for social networking.’ The rules are printed after the jump. Guess our homework tonight is to find out why this initiative was kick-started now?
Context & Ripple Effects
ESPN's PR shop has circulated 'additional guidelines for social networking' to staff, confirming that the company is formalizing how its talent uses Twitter and Facebook. The move lands three months after the Wall Street Journal's conduct rules targeting Twitter and Facebook made newsroom-by-newsroom social policies the industry conversation, so ESPN is following an established template rather than inventing one.
The timing matters against ESPN's own arc: December's redesign of ESPN.com to eject clutter, a confirmed push for new advertising options on the site, and ESPN360's ISP-fee model all show a company steering its brand tightly across every channel even as its sister cable networks hit rare weakness. Guidelines that govern what employees say on third-party platforms extend that control to the fastest-growing channel of 2009.
First-order effects
- ESPN reporters, anchors, and analysts now operate under explicit house rules on Twitter and Facebook, meaning personal posts about sources, games, or colleagues become reviewable under editorial standards.
- The Big Lead notes ESPN sent the guidelines unprompted, which signals management wants compliance ahead of any public incident rather than after one.
Second-order effects
- Rival outlets covering sports and general news now have two reference points — Dow Jones and ESPN — when drafting their own policies, accelerating copycat adoption across newsrooms.
- Athletes and reporters building direct audiences on Twitter face a widening gap between what their employers sanction and what the platform rewards, pressuring talent to negotiate where their personal voice lives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking at media companies becomes governed infrastructure: brand-sanctioned accounts with approval workflows alongside constrained personal ones, echoing the nominal-versus-usable-openness gap between platforms that promise reach and employers that ration it.
- Newsroom social policy in 2009 is emerging as the successor to source-protection and conflict-of-interest rules — a durable governance layer that outlasts any single platform's popularity.
The trend: Media companies are converting free-form employee social networking into policy-managed brand channels, with ESPN and the Journal setting the template other newsrooms will copy.