I’m a PR person with a journalism degree from Ryerson. As a PR guy, I’ve had media at major dailies ask me to dictate copy to them over the phone and publish quotes from me first and then phone me to ask me if “that was something I would have said”. I’ve had media knowingly publish rumour and anonymous-sourced stories without trying to get a confirmation from my organization. Fact is, I’m sure PR people have had as many disappointing experiences with media as media have had with them. It makes the world go ’round.

As far as social media is concerned, Ira’s got the same questions that many of us have. How do media, PR people and citizens with access to a raft of self-publishing tools co-exist and make sense of the completely unfettered, unstructured and unedited flow of information we have to deal with on a real time basis?

It’s really about the nature of conversation.

* When the speaker is excluded from the conversation, it really does amount to a technophilic version of talking behind someone’s back. That’s the big problem here: Ira couldn’t see the tweets…
* …in part presumably because he hasn’t chosen to embrace technology in that form. Is he at fault for that? Really hard to say.
* In response to Ira’s point re. journalists not being able to simply state opinions without justification vs. bloggers having no such restrictions, esp. in the case of Twitter it’s because it’s very different. Journalists have a soapbox and a megaphone: my comments and your comments don’t appear suddently in the article we disagree with. So they must be held accountable. But with Twitter, if you say something unfounded in a conversation, six other people can point it out.