Your social media gut says share the information with a dose of skepticism and see if anyone can corroborate it. Your journalistic head says don’t touch it — you don’t know where it’s been.

The issue of whether journalists should forward information they find in social networks without verifying it cuts to what has traditionally been a core principle of journalism: we publish true things only.

But does retweeting constitute “publishing” as we’ve traditionally defined it?  News organizations such as the LA Times and the Associated Press say it does — and journalists should apply the same standards as they would with any story. Others such as Reuters and the BBC suggest retweets constitute a process of journalism, not an end product.

I’ve been working with three colleagues on the Canadian Association of Journalists Ethics Committee over the past couple of months to prepare a draft of guidelines for retweeting or forwarding information found in social networks. We conclude that journalists can gain a lot by participating in real-time social networks. But if they retweet, they should apply a checklist of questions about sourcing and aim for transparency about what they know — and don’t know.

The draft will be discussed Friday, May 28, 2010 at the CAJ conference in Montreal. Take a look and tell us what you think.

Photo: Extra Ketchup/Flickr

Interest in the report authored by U.K. teen Matthew Robson says a lot about how much we fret over how young people consume media.

London-based market research firm Morgan Stanley published the report, authored by their 15-year-old intern, last week. As the Globe and Mail reports today, the paper, “How Teenagers Consume Media,” has since become a minor sensation. Much has been made about the excess of anecdote and lack of research in the report, but it is clear Matthew is a remarkably articulate 15-year-old with an unusual ability to synthesize the activities of his peers.

Why the interest? My guess is a general fear that young people understand something about the Internet that we oldsters don’t.

Matthew’s comment about Twitter use among his peers is the most quoted observation. He states that while most teens are heavy Facebook users, “Teenagers do not use Twitter … They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets” are pointless.” The comment follows barely a month after Nielsen’s announcement that Twitter was the fastest-growing Web brand this spring.

Huh? How do we reconcile that?

Well, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky makes a fine argument as to why it’s important we not read too much into Matthew’s paper.

Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other … With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there.

Teens are all about socializing with close friends — an activity well suited to closed networks such Facebook. Twitter is about spreading information far and wide to people you don’t even know.

As Suw Charman-Anderson points out, the most interesting thing is how little seems to be understood about this age group. Every generation struggles to understand young people, of course. But there is a fair bit of research about them (see John Palfrey’s Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives). Charman-Anderson cites danah boyd’s research and suggests that there’s still a strong disconnect between academics and analysts — not to mention the general public — on the issue.

The fact that they haven’t ever had a clear insight into the teen demographic would seem to imply that their existing researchers and analysts aren’t doing their jobs properly. The information is out there, a lot of it is freely available, and all that remains is for someone to read it and write the report.

It would seem there is much work for journalists here too.

Twist's data on "Michael Jackson" tweets on June 25.

There were some interesting observations today about the effect of Michael Jackson’s death on search services.

Google reports that interest in the June 25 event was “meteoric.” It led to one of the largest mobile search spikes Google had ever recorded, involving 5 of the top 20 searches that day. The spike in queries was so great that Google News initially mistook the barrage as an automated attack. Its software automatically suspended queries on the topic for 25 minutes, interpreting the requests as a denial of service attack.

A number of users reported that the wave of interest slowed Twitter to a snail’s pace. Twist, a site that tracks trends in Twitter, recorded “Michael Jackson” appearing in a peak of 22.61% of all tweets yesterday. Twitter temporarily disabled search results late in the day. No real surprise there. Service problems at the 2-year old start-up are well known.

Mashable reports that Facebook was actually by far the dominant sharing service for the news. Its data from widget network Clearspring shows that roughly five times as many people who shared a story using its website widget used Facebook than used Twitter. Facebook, of course, has a much larger user base. But Twitter usage received most of the media coverage.