The Busch Light guy and the Des Moines Register

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...orter-fired-aaron-calvin-carson?origin=web-hf

He tells Buzzfeed he was doing what his editors told him to, with the "full blessing and awareness" of the senior editors throughout the process.

 

I haven’t followed this quite as closely as I’d like, so a question.

Does the DMR do this on all profiles? Like, the high school girls basketball player who scored 38 points last week gets the social media scrub?

I wonder if the DMR knew before the story was written there might be something out there.

 

Calvin used to work for BuzzFeed, so no surprise he went to them to try to save face. But there is no saving him from this. His tweets were so much worse than anything Carson King sent and were more recent. Publishing King's tweets isn't what got him fired. It's his own racist, sexist, anti-cop and homophobic tweets that got him fired and no one should feel sympathy for the guy.

 

Can I just say I've always hated the idea of social-media based journalism?

 

The current most lazy form of journalism is "virtual man on the street." String a bunch of tweets together as a "reaction" to some topic, without any grunt work involved. Then post it with YOUR BYLINE like you actually did something other than do a "search for" and select your favorite hot takes, no matter whether they're actually accountable or not. Is this where journalism is headed: the squeakiest wheel?

 

You are my spirit animal, maumann. So lazy, and so "click-driven", which makes it a Gannett special.

I would bet folding money that the social media searches on subjects are common, required practice there. And it bit them in the ass this time.

I've seen a couple of writers at the DMR talk about how they are deleting the Twitter app, at least on their phones, and how happy they are to do it. Wonder if they know the kid was acting on orders from his bosses and they are staging some sort of protest about the way he was treated?

 

Twitter is the Devil.

 

Thank you. This is the point many people keep glossing over.

 

Never tweet.

If anyone here has a Twitter account and actively posts on it, do yourself a favor and take a day to go through and make sure anything you said in the last couple years couldn't be taken out of context and lead to your firing.

If that's too much, consider scrubbing your old tweets, regardless if they are bad. I recently wrote a program to clean my profile (I don't post that much anyway) and narrowed it down from 2K tweets over 10 years to just under 100. I plan to scrub my account every few months.

 

This does kind of remind me of the Luke Heimlich story the Oregonian fell into. A major profile on dominant college pitcher ahead of the post-season, reporter follows protocol and does a standard background check (Which the O started after doing a feature on a clown or someone doing something for kids and learning some unfortunate info after it was published). I've been bit by it - editor tells me to do a story of a veteran who called in to offer perspective after 9/11 - turned out he was drummed out of the service for abusing his kid. Thankfully, all I had to deal with was a tearful former sister-in-law who accepted my apologies.

 

To quote Steve Czaban, it's a 140-character resignation letter that's always ready and waiting for you to send.

We have a Twitter account for our sports section that I post links to our stories to. I have no desire whatsoever to even start a personal account. Maybe it's held me back in this business, but I'm willing to accept that cost.