Almost 30 years ago my first colleague in journalism education – the late Charles Stuart – summarised the curriculum of a journalism degree.
“In the first year you teach them how to write an intro (lead),” he said.
“In year two you teach them how to write the body of the story.
“And in their final year you revise the intro.”
While Charles’ advice was delivered tongue in cheek, he certainly hit upon one of the greatest challenges facing students of basic news reporting – how to sum up the key elements of a story in an interesting way in just a few words.
I recalled that conversation as I set the in-class exercises for my Introduction to Journalism tutorials this week and turned to Twitter to help out.
Twitter has its pluses and minuses as a social medium, but there is no doubting its value as a platform for clear and concise expression.
Its 140 character format equates to 20-22 words and thus it lends itself to an exercise where students can try their hand at a basic news lead.
Our 300 first year students were prepped on the basics in their lecture and briefed on the importance of Twitter in modern day journalism as a means of communication with colleagues and sources, finding useful news angles, and in accessing contacts and basic information when a news event unfolds.
We decided the course code #1508HUM made a suitable class hashtag and assigned students to live tweet the lecture to reinforce its value.
Live tweeting from my intro to Journalism lecture discussing author Rudyard Kipling #1508HUM
As an example of an effective use of Twitter in journalism I showed them the Twitter feed from ABC PM presenter Mark Colvin’s to the 85,000 followers of his @Colvinius handle and explained that it was a badge of honour for Twitter users if Colvinius ever retweeted your tweets.
One of my live tweeters approached me in the lecture break to show me his dialogue with @Colvinius during my class.
@day_jake93 Livetweeting anything's like any form of journalism: try to be quick, get your facts right, write short simple clear sentences.
Quite a coup. Clearly Jake gets it. (BTW, thanks @Colvinius).
Students who did not have Twitter accounts signed up for them prior to the tute and we started the session with an exercise requiring students to interview a classmate and introduce them to the group by spelling their name very clearly and stating an interesting fact about them.
We then talked about news values and what might make news for a campus community.
We embarked on our Twitter news hunt, wandering the campus in search of stories using our five normal senses plus the students’ evolving “news sense”.
Some of the stories came from noticeboards, although I explained a journalist would call to verify any information found there.
Others were based on interesting happenings around the campus during our 20 minute walk, including a cheerleader squad practice, an interview with a student events officer, and an array of photos and interviews from the student clubs sign-on stalls.
The exercise has the following benefits:
It teaches students the art of summing up a story in just a few words in an era when the attention span of news audiences is just a few seconds.
It introduces them to one use of social media in modern journalism.
It allows students to experiment with multi-media reportage if they attach photos, sound or vision.
It allows debate over the news value of campus-based stories.
And it does all of this within the comfort of a hashtag that allows them to experience publishing their first news story that technically all the world can see while in reality very few people other than their peers and tutors will actually view it.
You can see some highlights below, or even visit the #1508HUM hashtag if you are really interested.
I’d certainly recommend such an exercise to colleagues not already doing something similar in their first news writing classes.
Student Guild Textbook Fair, "Going off like a frog in a sock!", says GBSA president, George Sano #1508HUM
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
Our latest edition of The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law (Mark Pearson & Mark Polden, Allen & Unwin, 2015) has a whole chapter on law for public relations, freelancing and new media entrepreneurs.
One of the key topics arising for such people is the law of contract, which is a complex field requiring expert legal advice.
We’ve mapped out the very basics though for the benefit of such professional communicators. Here’s a short excerpt:
A breach of an important contract can be devastating to the financial viability of a public relations consultancy or freelance writer, and it can ruin the prospects of a start-up media venture getting off the ground. While the law of contract can get very complex, the basic concept of a contract is fairly simple: a contract is a legally enforceable promise. It is something crucial to the effective operation of a business, because our financial system operates on the principle of promises being kept rather than broken, so that there is an element of trust and predictability in our dealings. Contracts play a role in a variety of situations in the PR and news business. They can cover the terms of employment for a freelance journalist or other staff, the agreed price and timelines for professional services being offered, and the division of royalties that might flow to investors from a creative news product you are bringing to market. Gibson and Fraser (2011: 305–6) list the essential elements of a contract:
an intention to contract
an agreement between the parties (including an offer and acceptance)
‘consideration’—what Gibson and Fraser (2011: 305–6) describe as ‘something of value passing from one party to another in return for a promise to do something’.
Contract law can be a specialised area, and constitutes a subject in law degrees—partly because there is a body of case law over the circumstances in which a contract might be deemed valid by a court. In determining a contract’s validity, a court will consider the legal capacity of the parties who have entered into the contract, evidence of their consent, the legality of the purpose of the contract and the form the contract takes (Gibson and Fraser, 2011: 307). The action for ‘breach of contract’ arises when one or more terms of the contract have not been met—which might include work not being completed within an agreed timeline. This is usually where lawyers enter the fray, and a contract dispute can involve long and expensive court action, although alternative forms of dispute resolution are becoming more common. Griggs, Clark and Iredale (2009: 85) recommend that managers follow these steps when they are drawing up a business contract:
reducing the agreement to writing and ensuring it contains all the agreed terms
drafting it in plain English that does not require interpretation
ensuring it contemplates obvious problems and presents a process for a solution
ensuring compliance with any relevant legislation
limiting exposure to liability
identifying the law that should apply, particularly in international contracts.
A complex sub-branch of the law of contract is the law of agency—the term used to describe the authority you might assign to someone to enter into contracts on behalf of your business. An example of a contract dispute over public relations services was a West Australian District Court case involving a consultant to a South African mining company considering buyouts or mergers with other mining companies (Mining PR case, 2004). The dispute surrounded a ‘partly written, partly oral and partly implied’ agreement to provide ‘public relations, lobbying, consulting, networking, facilitating and co-ordinating’ services. The problem was that very little was detailed in the agreement, forcing the judge to look at previous work done by the consultant and to come to an estimate of the number of hours he had worked and their value on this occasion. He awarded him $830 per day for eight weeks, totalling $33 200 plus expenses.
References
Gibson, A. and Fraser, I. 2011, Business Law, 6th edn, Pearson Education, Sydney.
Griggs, L., Clark, E. and Iredale, I. 2009, Managers and the Law: A Guide for Business Decision Makers, 3rd edn, Thomson Reuters, Sydney.
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
My Skype guest of the week for our Social Media Law and Risk Management course this week is Professor Andrew Crane from York University in Toronto, Canada, the author of one of our key readings for the week on stakeholder theory.
The article is co-authored with Trish Ruebottom and is titled ‘Stakeholder Theory and Social Identity: Rethinking Stakeholder Identification’, Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 102, Supplement 1: Ethics, Corporations, and Governance (2011), pp. 77-87
We discussed the application of stakeholder theory to social media risk management and policy development. Professor Crane starts by explaining the basics of stakeholder theory (video and transcript below). Enjoy!
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Mark Pearson (@Journlaw): I am delighted to be joined here today by Professor Andrew Crane who is the George R Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics and Director of the Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business at the Schulich School of Business in the York University in Toronto, Canada. Welcome Andy.
Professor Andrew Crane: Thank you Mark, it’s a pleasure to meet you.
MP: Well you’ve done a lot of research and writing in Stakeholder Theory, and my students have actually been reading one of your co-authored articles on the topic. And for postgrad students who are relatively new to this theory, would you mind just giving a nutshell summary for them?
AC: Sure. Stakeholder Theory is a pretty simple idea in many respects, you know. It’s really about the idea that corporations in particular are not just there to serve the interests of shareholders. So Stakeholder Theory was designed to give us a way of thinking about other ways of understanding both the ownership of corporations, but in particular how decisions should be made. So, who should be involved in decision making, and how should the benefits that are, driven by corporations, the value that is created by them; who should it go to? So Stakeholder Theory is really about those sorts of questions, so who can affect organisations, but also who is affected by them, and what sort of rights do they have in respect to that stake they have, how should they be consulted, how should they be involved in the decision making, and those sorts of things. So it’s a very broad theory, and I saw that in one of your other readings you had the paper What Stakeholder Theory is Not, because there is a whole sort of set of different ways of understanding what it is – you know, it’s a very simple idea: there are multiple constituencies in any organisation, but then when it comes to [the question] of well, who is actually included and what are the implications of that, then it becomes a much broader discussion of the purpose of corporations.
MP: Yes, and we see that at its simplest level, I guess it’s just simply a matter of stakeholders being there to serve the interests of a company, and the main stakeholders being the shareholders and the customers and the corporate directors. But really your article and the other one you mentioned certainly extends that a lot further and it enters that corporate ethics field, where a company and its decisions have so many more stakeholders interests at play.
AC: Exactly
MP: So, coming to your article which starts to talk about social identity and basically presenting a grid which shows some intersection of what might be seen as a traditional role in relation to a corporation, and other social roles someone might play. Would you mind just talking us through the basic principles there and your spin on that?
AC: The basic way we understand stakeholders is the kinds of interactions that they have with the firm; so we think about them as either customers or employees and suppliers, regulators or NGOs or whatever else they might be. That’s typical kind of transactional view of who those different constituencies are. But the reason why different groups may actually mobilise or try and gain legitimacy in relation to firm, how they might press their claims, the kind of stake that they think they have, is not always about those simple transactions that they are engaged with. The reasons that people do things, the reasons people collect together to collaborate and press their claims upon firms are also about who people believe they are, about their social identity. So what are the bonds that connect me to other people that means these are the things that bring people together and make them mobilise in a social movement or some sort of pressure towards companies. So it may well be that I’m a customer of a firm, but I’m might simultaneously also be an employee, I might also hold shares in that firm; and I’ve got all kinds of different relationships with that firm at any one time. What we are trying to do with (Stakeholder) Theory with our paper is to say well, when people actually do try and press their claims, it is often about who we feel connected to that’s important. So the fact that I’m a white, British male for example who lives in Canada, that is very important for why I may be involved, why I might connect with certain firms. For example, it might be very different if I was a woman or a person of colour, or any other kind of quality which might impact on how I connect with companies.
MP: Well it seems, because of that very reason, to lend itself to an examination of social media in relation to a corporation; and particularly in the case of an emerging crisis because people with different social identities might fluctuate more towards social media for different reasons and in different places. Have you thought yourself about the interaction of Stakeholder Theory and social media in the corporation?
AC: I think one of the important ways of connecting up Stakeholder Theory and social media as well if a firm is trying to work out who it should be communicating with through social media; who the constituencies who are important; Stakeholder Theory provides a framework for that, because it gives us a way of thinking through who are the legitimate constituencies that we should be connecting with, how can we distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate, and also between who are the more powerful or less powerful that we should be connecting with. Stakeholder Theory is often seen in very instrumental terms in that sense; it is a strong instrumental approach there which says firms will care about stakeholders that matter – those that have power, those that have legitimacy, those whose stakes are very urgent. So social media is all about power in many respects; it’s about who you can influence, who you can connect to, how many people in your list of Twitter followers and what have you. So for firms it provides a framework for them to establish who matters in terms of their different constituencies. If we take it in an ethical dimension, take it in a more normative perspective, we say well ‘what rights do those people then have’? What sort of rights do you have as an employee, as a consumer, as a broader stakeholder of an organisation in relation to how it is going to communicate to you – in terms of protection of privacy, protection of various rights in terms of bullying and other things through social media?
MP: Yes – and also I think it can catch some corporations by surprise if they haven’t thought through particular social media stakeholders, or people who are using social media who may be stakeholders. And we see this with these grassroots campaigns against major corporations where they’ve underestimated the power of public momentum and social conscious using social media – which fits with your social identity perspective on that, doesn’t it?
AC: Absolutely. I think one of the interesting things here is that we tend to think of stakeholders in terms of a hub with spokes, right? Here’s the firm, here’s the decision making unit, and here’s the employees, here’s the consumers, here’s the suppliers, here’s the others; but social media is all about interconnections between different stakeholders and between different groups. You can’t think in those terms anymore if you’re trying to understand social media. Stakeholder Theory has limits in its traditional view and understanding it, unless you take it to a much more networked, much more nuanced kind of understanding of the types of environments that firms are interacting with.
MP: Well, while Stakeholder Theory might be very useful in research and the academic and looking at corporations and their interaction with various stakeholders, how useful is it as a practical tool in an organisation? So if you were a marketing manager or a public relations manager and you wished to avert some crisis in your company by trying to ascertain who the various stakeholders are and their respective interests.
AC: It can be very useful. It depends how you use it. It can be very effective at helping firms become prepared for identifying the various constituencies they need to be concerned about. If you take it seriously you need to be creative about trying to imagine who those constituencies are, because it is not just who is going to affect you now, when you think about a particular decision, who is going to be affected further down the line. So it can help you to identify these constituencies, but it can also help you to start thinking about, well, how can we predict what the type of response will be from those constituencies, depending upon how much power they have, how much influence, leverage, whether they are connected to other stakeholders in ways that mean they can leverage even greater influence and those sorts of things. So you can start to predict the kind of responses that may happen based on simple stakeholder framework that then gets into the idea of who has power, who can influence what is going to happen in the firm.
MP: And could you see it fitting in any way into the planning and drafting of a social media policy within an organisation?
AC: Certainly, yes. Both in terms of identifying who should be included in that policy, but perhaps more importantly, who should actually be involved in even devising the policy. Stakeholder Theory is all about who should be involved in decision making, so the question will be can we just set up a policy and then kind of send it out and everyone is going to abide by it. Well, realistically, that is not how social media works is it? It is a very unruly phenomenon. So it’s also thinking about who should be involved in the decision making. Who are the parties who are affected by this, and with our social identity card on it. So it’s not just ‘okay we need to involve our employees, or we need to involve our consumers’, but what particular subgroups of those employees or consumers might we need to be concerned with? So Facebook had its big issues with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans community a couple of years ago by making sure that everyone had their real name as part of their Facebook profiles. This community was saying that they wanted also to express other identities as part of their names. So if you don’t have those groups involved when you’re setting up that policy in the first place, you’ve got all sorts of problems down the line when you realise you’ve upset core constituencies without thinking what it is that bind us all together in terms of our identity.
MP: Well that’s terrific, thanks Professor Crane. It’s great to have one of the authors of our readings talking to us about the subject matter at hand, and I would really thank you for your time today.
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
Griffith University has issued the following release on our fully online global social media law course which I will be teaching from March 2015.
New course helps manage social media risk
Managing your social media risk and protecting your brand is the focus of a fully online global social media law course to be offered at Griffith University from March 2015.
Social Media Law and Risk Management is aimed at professional communicators internationally who want an introduction to the laws impacting on social media use and other strategies for strategic social media management.
“It addresses one of the key organisational and crisis communication phenomena of the modern era – engaging effectively and internationally with a range of stakeholders using social media while being cognisant of laws, risks and policies,’’ says course convenor Professor Mark Pearson.
“The course examines the dynamic role of social media law and risk management in a range of social and political contexts internationally, particularly in averting communication crises.
“It provides advanced knowledge and skills in the use of social media by government, non-governmental organisations, business and the general public.”
Social Media Law and Risk Management is offered online as a stand-alone course or as part of a suite of four courses in the Graduate Certificate in Crisis Communication for students who can visit Griffith University’s Gold Coast or Nathan campuses for their other three courses.
Media Contact: Deborah Marshall, 0409 613 992, d.marshall@griffith.edu.au
—-
Please drop me a line at m.pearson@griffith.edu.au if you would like further information after reading the course brochure available here.
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
WE have now posted the course profile for our fully online global social media law course which I will be teaching from Griffith University, starting in March 2015.
Titled ‘Social Media Law and Risk Management’, the course is targeted at professional communicators internationally who want an introduction to the laws impacting on social media use and other strategies for strategic social media management including social media policies and risk analysis.
The course can be undertaken as a fully online, stand-alone unit if you just want these skills and may not be able to attend in person, or as part of a suite of four courses in the Graduate Certificate in Crisis Management for students who can visit Griffith University’s Gold Coast or Nathan campuses for their other three courses.
You can read more about the entry requirements, application procedures and fees for the social media law course here.
The course outline, including the learning activities and assessment, can be viewed here.
The course examines the dynamic role of social media law and risk management in a range of social and political contexts internationally, particularly in the averting of communication crises. It provides advanced knowledge and skills in the use of social media by government, non-governmental organisations, business, and the general public. Its special focus is on law and risk management in social media in a global context.
After explaining the basic legal concepts required for effective analysis and understanding, and the elements of stakeholder theory underpinning the course, we then proceed to examine key areas of the law arising internationally when professional communicators use social media. These include defamation, contempt of court, privacy, confidentiality, discrimination, copyright, consumer law and censorship. This feeds into a critical examination of the terms of use of social media providers, effective social media policy formulation and social media risk management – all key skills and understandings for crisis communication.
The course can be completed online with no requirement for on-campus attendance. For on-campus students two meetings per semester will be held on the Nathan and Gold Coast campuses for students to meet colleagues and workshop material with instructors. Learning activities will include video lectures, readings, online discussion board activity, social media interaction, multiple choice quizzes and problem-based learning. Each module is focused upon a social media law or risk scenario where students are challenged to draw upon their readings, case studies and professional experience to map out an appropriate diagnosis and strategic course of action.
‘Social Media Law and Risk Management’ addresses one of the key organisational and crisis communication phenomena of the modern era – engaging effectively and internationally with a range of stakeholders using social media while being cognisant of laws, risks and policies.
The course integrates theory and practice by introducing both stakeholder theory and jurisprudential theory of legal systems in the first module and then applying both in the balance of the course throughout learning activities and assessment tasks. The readings, learning problems and portfolio are designed to allow students to find recent cases from within their own jurisdictions internationally to make their learning most relevant to their particular nation, state or territory of professional practice.
Of course, social media is an international medium and therefore all students need to be broadly aware of the laws and risks applying globally. The course bears a direct relationship to students’ professional needs as crisis communicators in a variety of career roles – public relations, journalism, government communications, corporate communications, social media moderation, marketing, human resources and law.
Assessment includes a reflective learning journal, online multiple choice quizzes, and a written assignment involving the critical appraisal of a social media policy.
Please drop me a line at m.pearson@griffith.edu.au if you would like further information after reading the course brochure available here.
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
w and Risk Management’ addresses one of the key organisational and crisis communication phenomena of the modern era – engaging effectively and internationally with a range of stakeholders using social media while being cognisant of laws, risks and policies.
journlaw 