Month: May 2021

Rather than a universal identifier like the ones being developed by The Trade Desk or LiveRamp, which Google has said it won’t support in its open exchange, Amazon’s identifier will live solely inside of Amazon’s ecosystem: Available to the buy side via Amazon’s DSP, and available to publishers through its publisher services division APS, those sources said.

“They are thinking about it more in terms of Google’s ‘ppid,’ where it’s siloed to a particular network of O&O sites,” said a source at one company that’s discussed the prospect with Amazon, referring to a publisher-provided ID. “It would be more as a means to inform their DSP of frequency and attribution while maintaining an identity silo.” 

It’s not clear when Amazon plans to launch something. A second source said that it seemed as if momentum around the identifier had gathered steam; a third said that Amazon seemed focused on getting the privacy dimensions of its offering right first, a crucial step for a company that still generates just a small portion of its revenue from advertising. A spokesperson from Amazon said the identifier will operate in accordance with Amazon’s privacy notice, interest-based ads and opt-out policies.

But when an Amazon identity offering materializes, it could significantly tilt the balance of power in digital advertising toward Amazon, which had already built significant momentum behind its DSP last year and which many advertisers see as best-positioned to thrive after the deprecation of third-party cookies. It ranked highest among all DSPs in a survey conducted late last year by Advertiser Perceptions.

An identifier could also help significantly boost Amazon’s APS business, which Amazon has long used to try and maximize the availability of inventory outside its own walled garden. “APS was always going to be a differentiator for them,” said Nicholas Seoh, the director of MightyHive’s commerce practice. “[An identifier]’s kind of a door opening to push this more.”

It would also help usher in a new, significantly more balkanized era, where advertisers will have to use the different identifiers and tech of a small handful of walled gardens, even to reach what many describe as the open internet. Late last week, Google’s gm of ads, Jerry Dischler, reiterated that Google has no plans to support alternate identifiers in its own ecosystem.

“I do wonder if the buy side is ultimately just going to have to settle for a set of further fragmented buys than what they do today,” the first source said.

Amazon did not make an executive available for comment for this story; a spokesperson said that the identifier would be available only to publishers that meet Amazon’s requirements, without elaborating on what those requirements are. 

The concept of a publisher-provided ID, which has long played a role in private marketplace deals, has recently gotten a fresh look; Google announced in mid-March it would do more to encourage the use of PPIDs in the open programmatic ecosystem, giving publishers the ability to make their respective IDs available in open exchanges to advertisers they designated. That work is in an experimental stage, according to Google’s announcement.

The challenge with all of these IDs, though, is scale, and whether they can summon sufficient demand to make them worth the while of buyers or sellers. Amazon’s ability to clearly map out transactions, however, as well as the penetration of its DSP, set it off to a good start.

“As advertisers look to navigate the future, they’re going to continue to look to partners in the near term who can do 1-to-1, both targeting and measurement,” said Lauren Fisher, evp of business intelligence at the research firm Advertiser Perceptions.

More than anything, Fisher said, “the measurement front, the partners that have that closed-loop look are going to become increasingly important.” 

The livestream shopping model is coming back around in the U.S. and is not limiting itself to the traditional television channels and “call-now” directives that QVC and HSN have done in past decades.

NTWRK, a livestream shopping company aimed primarily at Gen Z and millennial audiences, launched in late 2018 and has accumulated 2 million consumers since then on its iOS and Android apps, which are currently the only platforms that shoppers can transact on. By 2025, the goal is to increase that number to 50 million, as well as make more than $1 billion in revenue, said Aaron Levant, CEO of NTWRK, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

The livestream shopping platform sells physical products like art, sneakers, and limited edition products that are created in collaboration with hand-selected artists vetted by NTWRK’s merchandising team. But after seeing a surge of interest around NFTs and learning the reasons behind why people pay for digital ownership of online products, Levant said his team realized that physical collectors and digital collectors overlap quite nicely within the NTWRK consumer base. As a result, this month NTWRK we’ll be launching an NFT extension on its platform to further tap into these new shopping behaviors.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

QVC meets MTV

The easiest way to think of [NTWRK] is like part QVC part MTV. There’s a lot of programming on NTWRK that’s just purely entertaining. We have a weekly dating show that talks about dating and sex that also sells products. We have a weekly show about sneakers that features a lot of news about sneakers. There [are] exciting raffles and giveaways and guest hosts on that show on a weekly basis. We have a weekly show about pop culture that kind of covers broader fandom, comic books, collectibles, toys. And it’s not just trying to be transactional, we want to offer you up entertainment value and where you can tune in live and see one of your favorite creators and also interact with them in real-time.

Shopping holidays that aren’t hinged on deals

The shopping [holidays and seasons] that we’re in, historically at a macro level, especially here in the U.S., are really invented by corporations. See’s Candies or a flower company popularized the idea of buying stuff on Valentine’s Day. Someone invented Cyber Monday, someone invented Black Friday. Companies can get behind these ideas and at certain point when they last long enough, we just accept them as societal norms. I think content can drive consumer behavior, and we just call something a holiday, it just seems more special. And I think most people are going in some of those cases with the the wisdom of they want to make it promotional, they want to make it cheap. We’re going the opposite direction. We’re doing [festival shopping] but doing it on a monthly basis [and] they are made around different audience verticals. This is a full price premium holiday that is underlying by content and curation and bringing the best creators and brands in the world getting the create their most special products.

NFTs in the retail business model

We’re [already] working with these really creative artists, creators and lots of digital artists who either some are already in the NFT space, [or] some aspire to be in the NFT space are curious about it. And we already have a massive audience of people who, we’ve actually surveyed them, and we found out about 35% of our audience already has a digital wallet, or has some crypto holdings, and about 10% of the audience has already bought an NFT. So we see our audiences is ripe for this type of thing.

We’re offering a differentiated set of creators, or even digitally native creators, a way to drop and as well as [the unique ability of] pairing digital NFTs art drops with physical objects to go along with them. We’re well acclimated in the physical object space, and how do we combine those things in creating [additional] value experience?

Will Amazon pull MGM’s programming from other platforms?

As an independent film-and-TV studio, MGM made its money by selling distribution rights to its programming: to movie theaters, to TV networks, to streaming services. But as Netflix and Disney have demonstrated, the trend in the subscription-based streaming era is for companies to keep their programming to their own properties. Disney, for example, pulled many of its shows and movies from Netflix in the lead-up to Disney+’s launch. If Amazon follows that model, the company could maneuver to pull popular programming from streaming competitors, namely Disney. MGM produces “The Handmaid’s Tale” for Disney-owned Hulu, “Shark Tank” for Disney-owned ABC and “Fargo” for Disney-owned FX.

Depending on existing deal terms and the financial upside/downside of limiting programming to its own properties, Amazon may have MGM continue to produce some movies and shows to premiere elsewhere. But the company would seem to be well served by at least cherry-picking some programs for its own platform, if only to help Amazon Prime Video assert an identity. In the past year, 175 million Amazon Prime members have streamed a show or movie on Amazon’s subscription-based streamer, but it’s unclear how many of those people sought out the service or saw it as equivalent to pay-TV providers’ on-demand libraries.

“Amazon never really found a strategy. They started out with award-winning [shows and movies], but no one was watching. Then they got into [traditional TV-type programming] but with enormous budgets, but I don’t know that that worked either,” said an entertainment executive.

Will Amazon continue to release MGM movies in theaters?

In short, yes. But maybe only for the short term. MGM’s 2021 movie slate, which includes the next Bond film “No Time to Die,” will still premiere in theaters, according to Deadline. And considering that theatrical releases and international distribution deals remain the most lucrative direct means of companies making money from movies, any other big-budget blockbusters MGM has on the books are likely to also be released theatrically. Meanwhile, Amazon already has a history of releasing its own studio’s movies in theaters, as it did with Oscar winner “Manchester by the Sea.”

But Amazon may have only put its movies in theaters as a means of establishing itself in Hollywood to appeal to A-list talent and get top-tier directors, writers and actors/actresses to work with the company. But Amazon may have already asserted itself among the Hollywood firmament. In the past year, it has released movies and shows directed by Oscar winners Steve McQueen, Regina King and Barry Jenkins. So Amazon may not be buying one of Hollywood’s oldest studios to further entrench itself in the traditional entertainment industry but instead to bring more of the traditional entertainment industry into the streaming business. And the most drastic way Amazon could do that is by eschewing the traditional movie release strategy to premiere MGM’s films on Amazon Prime Video in order for the company to further ingratiate itself with Amazon Prime customers.

How will Amazon distribute MGM’s programming on its own streaming properties?

Amazon’s subscription-based streamer Prime Video will likely become the primary home of MGM’s library. Amazon wouldn’t be buying the studio if it didn’t think those movies and shows would help to convince people to pay and keep paying for Amazon Prime subscriptions. But Amazon could also use MGM’s programming to populate its free, ad-supported streaming TV service IMDb TV.

Amazon already licenses old movies and TV shows for IMDb TV, so adding more from MGM would not be a stretch by any means. But Amazon could go further. It could have MGM produce original programming specifically for the ad-supported streamer, as MGM had previously done for Vudu, back when it was owned by Amazon adversary Walmart. Moreover, Amazon may have sufficient reason to consider reducing the window to putting MGM’s recent premieres on IMDb TV. 

The ad-supported streaming audience may be fragmented across multiple streaming services, but at this point, it is sufficiently consolidated among the major ad-supported streamers that advertisers are not as pressured to buy inventory from aggregators to reach a large audience. “There are a lot of tier-3 streaming partners, so you can easily identify the top 10 to buy,” said one agency executive. 

That’s why original programming has become so important to streaming ad sellers, including longtime original programming holdout and Amazon rival Roku. IMDb TV has been building up its library of original programming for more than a year, and MGM will likely help it to add more exclusive shows and movies. 

Making IMDb TV an early destination for MGM’s upcoming movies — after their theatrical and/or premium video-on-demand runs — could help to attract more audiences and improve its sales pitch even more. It’s hard to see the financial sense in making “No Time to Die” available on IMDb TV at the same time as on Amazon Prime Video. But the calculation may be different for lower-budget, potentially lower-upside fare like MGM’s upcoming “The Addams Family 2.”

What other acquisitions will the Amazon-MGM deal trigger?

The streaming wars are a content arms race, and MGM was among the few remaining independent dealers without its own distribution platform. But it wasn’t the last. There’s still Sony Pictures. Following the Amazon-MGM announcement, Sony CEO Yoshida Kenichiro said the company does not plan to sell or spin off its studio. But in business, everything has a price, and the amount Sony could command for the studio behind the most recent “Spider-Man” movies has likely shot up. In the wake of Discovery-WarnerMedia and Amazon-MGM, companies like NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS as well as potentially even Apple may be feeling more pressure to add to their programming arsenals.

“At the end of the day, there are still only really four or five players: Netflix, Disney, Amazon and HBO. Then there’s everyone else,” said a second entertainment executive.

Will Amazon be allowed to acquire MGM?

Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire MGM, but it has not yet acquired MGM. Considering all the antitrust activity among members of Congress, government regulators may not take a liking to a tech giant absorbing a major movie-and-TV studio, especially at a time when two major media conglomerates are set to merge. Amazon has already been slapped with an antitrust lawsuit by the District of Columbia’s attorney general Karl Racine. Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar has already called for the Justice Department to investigate the Amazon-MGM deal, as have some Republican lawmakers.

“As the world re-emerges, lockdowns are lifted, and businesses reopen, so will the opportunity to reach people OOH,” said Hyun Lee Miller, vp of media at Good Apple. “What will also re-fuel OOH growth are the newer digital planning and activation tools like Vistar that make it easier to build data-driven DOOH plans.” 

And marketers aren’t just looking to the major metropolitan cities like NYC, San Francisco, Chicago or Los Angeles. Areas where people moved throughout the pandemic i.e. secondary cities like Atlanta, Miami and Austin, among others, are now becoming more popular for brands looking to add OOH and digital OOH back into the media mix. 

“We’ve had a lot [of brands], especially DTC brands, ask for Austin and ask for Miami,” said Brian Rappaport, CEO of indie OOH agency Quan, adding that pre-pandemic these areas weren’t as popular or even on the radar of some DTC brands. “I think before the pandemic, we were starting to get a little interest in Austin, but Miami really wasn’t that popular. But now Miami is.” 

Whether or not those ad dollars remain in those secondary cities and areas outside their metros will depend on whether or not people remain there, according to agency execs. 

“Clients are starting to look at their market mix to reach those audiences that might have left the cities to move to the suburbs, and we see dollars move to these areas,” said Martin Porter, head of OOH media at Dentsu. “However, according to USPS (July 2020), only 2% of total moves from cities were considered permanent in the last year.”

Porter added that “a large proportion [are] being deemed Boomerang moves — 27% of address moves were only temporary; people are taking medium-term lets for 1-2 years in the suburbs or second-tier cities while they had the opportunity to work from home, but they haven’t decided if that move is going to be permanent.” 

While the long-term impact on OOH and digital OOH placements regarding where people have moved over the last year is yet to be determined, marketers and agency execs say that’s not the only factor changing up OOH and DOOH placements now. With many people still working from home this summer, marketers are looking to expand those placements beyond transportation and work commute routes to factor in where people are spending their time now, explained Michelle Millar, vp and group director of media and activation at Hanson Dodge. 

“In the past you might’ve wanted to be in a location because [lots of people were commuting there],” said Millar. “But now with so many people working from home, [you have to think about ] where are they living [and how to reach them in those areas].”

3 Questions with Rakuten Rewards’ CMO Dana Marinaeu

What are some of the consumer habits that Rakuten is most honed in on and why?

Now that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and more people are getting vaccinated, we’re seeing indicators that the economy is going to start ramping back up. In the U.S., we are following similar trends in countries where the virus has already subsided, like China and Australia. As a result, we predict that this is going to lead to a wave of “revenge shopping,” where consumers will be chomping at the bit to finally book a vacation, or invest in a new outfit because they finally have an event to dress up for, or splurge on tickets for concerts that are being planned again.

Is that already happening?

We’re already starting to see this trend take shape. Overall, average order value is up 30% year over year. People are starting to be a bit freer with their spending, splurging on experiences that they have been deprived of for the past year. For example, ticket sales are up 50%, and travel is up 85% year over year. People are making big anticipatory plans, and this trend will only continue as more and more people get access to the vaccine and states continue to open up.

How will that affect Rakuten’s business?

As consumers shift to a mentality of ready to buy, it’s important for brands to get in front of them with offers that can influence their buying behavior. On the Rakuten Rewards platform, we’ve already seen brands that have ramped up media spend during the pandemic benefit from higher sales and traffic year over year, especially if they also elevated their cash-back offerings. For example, brands that spent more on promoting their cash-back offers on Rakuten.com in 2020 saw sales and traffic grow over 14% and 19% year over year, respectively. Brands with higher media spend who also participated in more elevated cash-back events on our site saw an increase in sales and traffic of over 38% and 56% year over year. As the “revenge shopping” trend continues, strategic channels like cash back will be key to owning share of market in those categories. — Kimeko McCoy

By the Numbers

Marketing strategy is always in flux; It’s the nature of the business. But with the Covid-19 pandemic having upended how people shop, work and ultimately live, marketers are tasked with being nimble in their approach to customer engagement. For example, according to CRM platform Copper’s  2021 Marketing and Sales Relationships Survey, marketers may need to revert to Mad Men-style, human to human marketing tactics to keep shoppers engaged. Here’s more from the report below:

• While 70% of the sales, marketing and advertising executives surveyed report that they have invested more in professional relationship-building within the past year, only half said they actually built new customer relationships.
• 73% expect to increase the size of their sales/marketing teams in the coming year.
• However, 88% continue to maintain or increase cold emailing efforts. And a combined 63% of respondents say they still receive the same or worse response to cold emailing, including none at all. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the Week

“Organic [strategy] is super hard. It’s like watching things go past in a river and saying we’re going to put our little raft out into the world as well and hope.”

— Simon Richings, executive creative director at London-based global creative agency AnalogFolk, told Kimeko McCoy when asked about an organic versus paid approach on TikTok.

What We’ve Covered

• Senior news editor Seb Joseph reported on the confusion fingerprinting and lack of enforcement re: Apple’s privacy safeguards.
• We spoke with the 4A’s evp of talent, equity and inclusion Simon Fenwick on DEI progress over the last year.
• Commerce reporter Erika Wheless dug into Shopify’s Shop Pay expansion.

That revenue is enabling Insider to subsequently invest in its advertising team, growing that staff by 25% over its last year count. Currently, the team consists of 130 employees, but that number is expected to reach 140 by the end of the year.

SAGA is a significant contributor to this business’s growth. It collects non-personal identifiable information (PII), with a particular focus on behavioral data coming from contextual indicators on interested topics such as stock price news within Insider’s content. That information is then used to create audience segments based on intent versus demographics, said Spande. It works for both programmatic and direct-sold campaigns, which Insider calls insertion orders, and currently one-third of the company’s advertising revenue comes from its data platform. Additionally, more than half of all advertising deals, both programmatic and direct, use a component of SAGA’s first-party data at this time. 

Insider makes about half of its revenue from advertising, according to Spande, with the balance between programmatic and direct-sold fluctuating but typically remaining at about a 50-50 split. The rest of Insider’s revenue comes from its subscriptions business which it has been actively building over the past three years, and other consumer revenue lines, like affiliate.

“In the early days of digital, publishers conceded this space to ad tech and the platforms. There are a handful of publishers that are now realizing that there is a role for us to play in that space and that there’s tremendous value in the data that we possess,” said Spande. 

With that said, Insider is also realizing that it needs employees who can help the company further step into the world of ad tech.

Over the past six months, hiring has steadily increased across the digital media industry including for pre-and post sale roles as well as sales, said Risa Goldberg, president of recruitment firm Media Recruiting Group, which works with digital media companies, advertising agencies and ad tech companies. Starting in March, there has been an explosion in hiring that she said she expects to continue this summer. 

And while the job market is booming across the industry, talent recruiting agency Grace Blue is finding that media clients with strong first-party data offerings are receiving more demand from advertisers as the death of the third-party cookie looms, and thus have started actively seeking more brand-facing talent who can cater to those growing advertiser needs, according to a company spokesperson. 

One of the major areas of focus for hiring, according to Spande, is ad tech and data experts who can take all of the information being collected by SAGA and use it for both internal content optimization, but also for making client campaigns more impactful, he said.

“A lot of our preconceived notions around what works just aren’t right any longer,” said Spande. “We bring a lot of baggage to the practice of marketing and we’re seeing now through both the targeting data and also the performance data on the other end, that there are other ways to approach these campaigns that can be much more successful.”

But it takes a highly specialized employee to be able to do that, Spande added. These positions include analysts and data operations people who can identify problems and opportunties for more efficient ad campaigns, as well as marketers who can look at the data and turn it into stories, “which is generally not where we’ve focused our time from a marketing perspective,” he add.

Insider is not yet at the point where it can have one seller per client, nor do its seller roles exclusively work in one advertising category, Spande said. But while hiring out the advertising team, he said people with specific industry expertise are being sought out to cater to the brand categories Insider works with, like its two largest, finance and tech, and emerging areas like travel, home good and fashion.

The move is significant, in part, because it will allow advertisers to gauge performance of their investments with Google as a whole rather than in disparate reports showing what happens in search or on YouTube separately, according to ad consultants.

“It’s one of these things we’ve been kind of waiting for for a long time,” said Ty Martin, founder of digital ad consultancy Ad Bacon. As an example, until now, a car insurance advertiser could only see when someone searched on Google for “car insurance” and two days later searched “Geico,” then converted by taking some type of action or buying insurance, he said. Now, they will be able to see when that customer also saw a YouTube ad in the midst of that process, which might have led to that conversion.

“From an organizational standpoint, what has been keeping executive decision-makers from investing is largely just a lack of rationale,” said Martin, adding that the new reporting capability could be a key factor convincing those decision-makers to invest in Google beyond search and direct-response advertising — something Google has pushed for years.

“This could give us a much more comprehensive view of the impact of our media investments, especially as the loss of cookie-based tracking erodes optimization and measurement in media buying,” said Laurie Miller, head of analytics at digital agency PMG. “At the end of the day, Google is the biggest ecosystem out there, and if we can gain better visibility into how the parts are working together, and act on those insights seamlessly, that would be huge,” she said.

Trusting Google’s automated systems 

During its event, Google also touted a service called conversion modeling that seeks to attribute ads when traditional identity tracking tools, like cookies, are not available. Originally announced in April, conversion modeling uses machine learning to take the ad attribution data collected when cookies are available and use it to project how someone who is not logged in and cannot be tracked via cookies may have been exposed to a campaign across Google’s properties and acted upon those ads, such as by visiting an advertiser’s site.

However, that approach requires the company to convince advertisers that its machine learning and automated systems are trustworthy. That requires transparency, something machine learning systems cannot always provide, and tech firms like Google are reluctant to expose. “We’ve heard automated solutions can feel like a black box,” said Jason Spero, Google’s vp of global business solutions, during the company’s event.

“[Automation] is probably the piece where there’s the most opportunity, but obviously where the industry has to shift the most,” said Amanda Martin, vp of enterprise partnerships at digital agency Goodway Group, who added that advertisers and agencies might not have full faith in Google’s machine learning models because of “the loss or lack of transparency.”

Trust and transparency in the firm’s attribution technology will be “tricky” for Google, said Feliks Malts, vp of decision sciences at digital agency 3Q Digital. He said attribution reports provided by the company could make it seem as though Google ads played a bigger role in getting someone to take an action than they actually did, in part because they do not take into consideration advertising outside the Google universe. “For advertisers that spend the majority of their budget with Google, this will be less of an issue, but when facing the reality of many larger advertisers that diversify their spend, this likely won’t be the case.”

Defying Antitrust pressure 

Google’s attribution and conversion modeling news seemed buried in a whirlwind overview of how the company wants advertisers to operate in a world without third-party cookies that Google itself has thrust upon them. But that may have been by design, since the attribution announcements appear to have the potential to further consolidate Google’s digital ad power, which could raise regulatory red flags.

With more government eyes than ever on the minutiae of Google’s ad business, its advancing mission to congeal its various products might not sit well with legislators and detractors who already warn of the company’s growing dominance in the digital advertising market. “It really feels like a step in the direction that would lead to some foreseeable antitrust issues,” said Ad Bacon’s Martin. Considering the potential for Google to deliver “extreme reach across so many different facets of advertising,” he said, “It would be conceivable they would amass a large portion of a single advertiser’s budget.”

Already Google leads digital ad spending worldwide with around 30% market share. “They’re trying to solidify the piece of the pie that they already have, which is extremely large,” said Goodway Group’s Martin.

• The Washington Post’s guidelines, which are posted online, do not appear to have been updated since 2016 (The Post declined to comment for this story). 

• CNN’s policies haven’t changed “in some time,” according to a spokesperson. 

• The latest edition of Bloomberg Way, Bloomberg’s guide for journalists’ best practices, was published in 2017.

• That same year, the special section on social media was updated in NPR’s Ethics Handbook, which was published in 2012. 

• BuzzFeed’s guide, which was published in 2015, was last updated in September 2019. 

• Gannett’s social media policy was updated in 2020, according to a spokesperson. 

• The New York Times updated its policy in November 2020.

Dos and don’ts

The media companies’ social media policies generally have similar points: focus on posting fact-based reporting, stay away from misinformation and gossip, be careful with personal opinions that could show bias, don’t endorse political or partisan views, don’t make customer service complaints and “don’t post anything that would undermine your credibility as an objective journalist,” as Bloomberg’s guidelines put it. In other words, social media posts should be considered reflections of the journalist and the media outlet they work for. 

Most of the companies’ social media guidelines for journalists are publicly available, such as BuzzFeed’s Standards and Ethics guide, The Washington Post’s Policies and Standards, The New York Times’ Social Media Guidelines for the Newsroom and NPR’s Ethics Handbook.

Other companies only distribute their policies internally, like CNN, Gannett and The Wall Street Journal, which all declined requests to share their social media guidelines. The Bloomberg Way is available on the Bloomberg Terminal and distributed to staff (screenshots of its social media section were shared with Digiday for this story). 

“The Wall Street Journal offers ongoing newsroom training for its journalists to address best practices using social media. We regularly evaluate our social media guidelines and make updates when necessary,” Emma Moody, editor of standards and ethics at The Wall Street Journal, said in an emailed statement.

An evergreen issue

Newsrooms have often struggled to find the right balance between setting boundaries for what their journalists can post online as representatives of their media outlets and giving them the freedom to use social media platforms as a channel to engage with audiences, improve transparency around reporting and distribute content. 

The AP isn’t the only media organization that’s been in hot water for disciplining an employee over a tweet. The Washington Post, for example, suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez for sharing a news story on Twitter about a rape allegation against NBA star Kobe Bryant right after his death in January 2020. One Post reporter recently said former Post executive editor Marty Baron was “too restrictive” of reporters’ social media activity. (Sally Buzbee, who was most recently executive editor of the AP and is due to take over Baron’s role at the Post on June 1, told NPR she had nothing to do with Wilder’s firing, distancing herself from the controversy at AP.) 

The New York Times had to tamp down the flames of Twitter’s wrath when it appeared that freelancer Lauren Wolfe’s relationship with the publisher was cut following a tweet she posted about President Joe Biden (The Times denies a connection between her employment and the tweet).

NPR

NPR is currently finalizing “significant” updates to its guidelines, a process that began last summer, according to a spokesperson. “We believe that standing up for human rights is not unto itself ‘political’ and the issue looks different from different perspectives,” the spokesperson said.

The changes, which will likely roll out in the next few weeks, address how NPR employees “can express their opinions and support for causes they believe in” on social media, as well as provide more clarity on the “traditional notions of objectivity,” the spokesperson said. The updates are being developed by two committees (Code of Conduct committee and Ethics Handbook committee) made up of 35 people, including journalists and non-journalists.

The current version of NPR’s Ethics Handbook’s social media section reads, in part: “You should conduct yourself in social media forums with an eye to how your behavior or comments might appear if we were called upon to defend them as being appropriate behavior by a journalist. In other words, don’t act any differently online than you would in any other public setting.”

Gannett

While Gannett’s Principles of Ethical Conduct are publicly available, its social media policy is an “internal document,” according to a spokesperson, who would not provide further details. Mizell Stewart III, vp of news performance, talent and partnerships for Gannett and the USA Today Network, said updates were made last year to “address staff questions around public support for the social justice movement and political parties.” 

The latest round of training “provided newsroom employees with guidance on how journalists should approach social media platforms in a way that informs their followers without expressing opinions or amplifying disinformation,” Stewart added. According to Stewart, one part of the social media policy tells journalists to “avoid sharing your opinion on events in the news when your primary role does not involve opinion journalism.”

Gannett has a three-strike policy, according to Michael McCarter, Gannett’s head of standards, ethics and inclusion: A first offense warrants a discussion; a second means verbal or written warnings; a third offense and beyond “can range from suspension to dismissal depending on the severity.”

“It is rare that someone is dismissed on a first offense unless the behavior or language is so egregious and blatantly unprofessional that termination is warranted,” McCarter said.

The New York Times

The New York Times’ social media guidelines were updated last year “to reflect new guidance around Twitter’s conversation settings and the use of muting and blocking on social media,” according to the webpage.

“The guidelines underscore our newsroom’s appreciation for the important role social media now plays in our journalism, but also call for our journalists to take extra care to avoid expressing partisan opinions or editorializing on issues that The Times is covering,” a spokesperson said.

Reporters such as Yamiche Alcindor, Peter Baker, Rukmini Callimachi, Nick Confessore, Max Fisher, Maggie Haberman, Katie Rogers and Margot Sanger-Katz contributed to the Times’ guidelines. Part of it reads: “If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.”

The Washington Post

The Washington Post’s policy section on social media reminds Post reporters that their social media accounts “reflect upon the reputation and credibility of the newsroom.” It tells journalists that they “must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could objectively be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism,” the social media section of the policies reads.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s social media policies address the importance of these platforms for journalists to do their jobs. “It provides a way for us to showcase our stories for a wider audience,” it reads, according to screenshots shared with Digiday. “It helps establish reporters as experts on their beats. And it’s essential if you want to break news, follow story development, identify trending topics and find sources.” 

However, the policies also acknowledge the risks of social media use for reporters: “Anything you write, whether on a work or personal account, can go viral and become part of permanent internet history. So it’s important for us to maintain our professionalism.” It also warns reporters that “with the social media megaphone always on, it’s vital for your reputation and Bloomberg’s that you act wisely.”

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed’s guide tells reporters that they “should avoid saying things they wouldn’t say in a news article or broadcast — that is, statements they can’t back with reporting.”

Shani O. Hilton, the former vp of news and programming for BuzzFeed News who left in June 2020 to become deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote in the intro to BuzzFeed’s guide: “We are making this document public to keep BuzzFeed News’ writers, reporters, and editors accountable to our readers.”