By Sruthijith KK @sruthijith
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The Times Group
owns several mass-circulation newspapers.AP
Photo/Aijaz Rahi
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Hundreds of journalists working at the
Times of India and its sister publications have received a peculiar request
from their employer: hand over your Twitter and Facebook passwords and let us
post for you.
Even after you leave the company.
Under a contract unveiled to employees
last week, Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd—India’s largest media
conglomerate and publisher of the Times of India, Economic Times,
among many other properties—told staffers they are not to post
any news links on their personal Twitter and Facebook accounts. This
runs counter to many social-media policies in newsrooms across the world, which
often encourage journalists to share content widely.
But BCCL, as the company is known, is
telling journalists that they must start a company-authorised account on
various social media platforms. They also have the option of converting existing
personal social media accounts to company accounts. On these, they are free to
discuss news and related material.
The company will possess log-in credentials
to such accounts and will be free to post any material to the account
without journalists’ knowledge. It is now also mandatory to disclose all
personal social-media accounts held by the journalist to the company.
It is these clauses that are
causing the most unease among employees at the group’s newspapers,
according to multiple journalists who asked not to be identified. They
said printed copies of the contract were circulated last week, with
instructions to sign immediately.
Thus far, the policy change does not
appear to have had an effect on the company’s journalists who are active
on Twitter. (Disclosure: I worked for The Economic Times until April.)
According to two journalists at the
group’s English-language newspapers, protests about the clauses in the
contract have not yielded much result. Reporters who have raised concerns with
their editors say they have mostly been told that those will be
addressed in due course.
BCCL CEO Ravi Dhariwal did not respond
to an email from Quartz seeking comment.
The company has been ramping up its web
presence in recent months by bringing in a slew of international brands to
India, such as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Business Insider, Ad Age, and most
recently, Huffington Post. It is unclear if this new policy will apply to
journalists hired to work at these digital brands.
Efforts to achieve greater integration
between the company’s print newsrooms and its online units are also
underway. BCCL’s newspapers recently started incorporating email ids of
reporters into bylines.
The contract, a copy of which has been
reviewed by Quartz, begins with a recognition of the growing importance of
social media, and states the company and the employee are “mutually desirous of
creating a user account on Facebook/Twitter/Google+ websites.” It goes on to
say that the employee will be required to post regular updates to the account.
Midway through the two-page contract:
"The posts made by you on User Account
shall contain news and other related material and may also contain any personal
material and interaction, which we encourage. You shall inform the company
about your personal user accounts and the same will be allowed by the company,
subject to you refraining from posting any news and other related material on
the same. The personal user account shall always belong to you and carried by
you in the event of any severance of your contract with the company."
At your
request, while in employment, your personal user account may be converted into
a company User Account. It is specifically agreed that on such conversion, all
intellectual property rights in such converted User Account shall be vested in
the company.
With this, BCCL journalists will
have to inform the company of social media accounts held by them—but
they can’t post their own stories or any news links. In other words, the only
way to function effectively as a journalist on social media is to either
agree to convert the personal account into a company account, or start a new
company account.
Once that is done, the company
will hold the key to those accounts, and can post any material to those
accounts as it deems fit. In fact, a journalist using such an account will be
doing so on behalf of the company.
The company shall be the owner of the
access passwords, username and associated email address for the User Account,
which shall be used by you on behalf of the Company to make posts. Company
retains administration rights of the User Account, which shall be made
accessible to the Company on demand. It is understood that sharing of such
details of the User Account shall be an integral part of your contract with the
Company and shall also be necessary for processing any settlement related to
termination of such Contract.
Even if you quit the company, it
reserves the rights to continue operating that account in your name.
The company may upload news or other
material on the company User Account through any means, including automated
upload streams, at its sole discretion, notwithstanding any termination of your
contract with the company.
All intellectual property and any
future revenue from these accounts belong to the company, the contract says.
The Hindu, another large English
newspaper, had recently asked its journalists to not share links from rival
news outlets on Twitter and Facebook.
Source: http://qz.com
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