The editor of a Midlands daily newspaper has been suspended on full pay after staff raised concerns over his use of Twitter.
Darren Parkin, editor of the Coventry Telegraph since 2009, was escorted from the newspaper’s offices last Wednesday afternoon.
It is understood that staff at the Trinity Mirror-owned title had raised concerns about his use of the social media site
A spokesman for Trinity Mirror said today: “I can confirm that a member of staff in Coventry has been suspended.”
News of the suspension was first carried earlier today on the website of a rival weekly title, the Bullivant Media-owned Coventry Observer.
It said Darren, 38, was now under investigation by Trinity Mirror bosses and that staff had been notified of the move last Thursday.
The last post on Darren’s @CovTelEd Twitter account, which he used mainly in order to promote the newspaper, is dated 6 June.
Originally from Yorkshire, Darren became the country’s youngest newspaper editor at the age of 24 at the Wolverhampton News.
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Unless any offending tweets have been removed I can’t see what the fuss is about. Sounds like a lively bloke working long hours engaging on twitter in an entertaining way. He’d probably fit in quite well in my office.
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I bet Darren’s feed gets a lot more traffic today as we all try and work out what the problem is. I’m with Subbie, there’s nothing there that would give cause for concern.
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What on earth did he do? His account seems completely innocuous.
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To be fair, this headline looked prescient, with hindsight:
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2010/01/25/coventry-telegraph-editor-promises-digital-fireworks/
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Hmmm…interesting. I am currently going through the cached version of the Twitter feed – this is where deleted content can sometimes be found. One can only speculate what the contentious content might be. Hands up though, anyone who has knocked holes in the keyboard and then thought twice about the resulting email….
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I am currently not bothering to look at any of Darren’s twitter posts.
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I don’t know what this matter is about but I recently wrote for another digital publisher and pointed out that related content has to be relevant – eg if you are writing features about up-market restaurants, linking to a DPs digital Twitter feed about them getting into/out of bed or full of expletives is not sound commercial sense. My editor did not seem to twig this at all – or the fact that uploading someone else’s random and personal twitter feed to my work was counterproductive in many ways – including the fact that it looked as though they’d written the article when the interviewee knew that I had. We agreed to part company. I have worked online for 12 years and in commercial enterprises related content has to be relevant eg a blog which reflects and enhances the content of the feature it is linked to; not a personal twitter feed/blog which is not relevant to the client or subject matter and might actually be detrimental if the content is very personal. Simples peeps.
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An exclusive for the Coventry Observer. But as usual the Telegraph knew about it days before….
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