Heavy Medal has a thoughtful post, debating the recent ouster of a Newbery Committee member for breaking rules related to social media. Here’s my comment:
This is such a dilemma. I started my blog in 2007 thinking naively that I’d feature a series on my Newbery reading (being on the 2008 Committee). Roger Sutton, on Caldecott, similarly had just started his blog. I remember vividly sitting with a bunch nascent bloggers at Midwinter that year where the Board was contemplating a rule that we could not blog at all. Happily they saw reason and we were allowed to blog non-award stuff. Since then I’ve watched the rules be strengthened and have puzzled about them. Why, I have wondered, can we talk in person about our preferences, but not online?
Sorting out what happened in this instance has helped me to understand. At first I was outraged, but then better understood how she had broken clearly delineated rules. And these conversations about what happened also makes it clear to me that for those with major social media following it is problematic to think of the platform in the same way as talking to a group of colleagues in RL. It is all that amplifying that is the problem. Your words go out to hundreds and thousands. So now sadly (because I too felt horrible for Angie) I better understand the need for this in some form. I look forward to seeing what the task force [established by ALSC president Nina Lindsay to revisit the guidelines] comes up with. Back in Roger’s and my day my sense was the Board was very vague on the nature of blogging, but now I assume there will be task force members who understand the situation thoroughly and thus trust their recommendations.
educating alice 