In February 2009 the BBC’s multimedia newsroom was being reorganised, with new senior editorial appointments expected at any moment. Peter Horrocks, the head of the newsroom, may have announced them ahead of schedule, on Twitter.
In a message addressed to Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of global news, Horrocks referred to two appointments and described one of the people as “bright”. The message was written as a reply, which meant that everyone following Horrocks could read it, and it had already been indexed by Twitter Search. The post raised the obvious question: was it meant as a private direct message?
The context was a vacancy for a new World Executive Editor of the BBC News website, created after the previous World Editor, Adam Curtis, moved to become Head of Editorial Standards for the multimedia newsroom. If the tweet was about the new appointments, the two names in it were Andrew Roy and Natalie Malinarich, the latter then an assistant editor on the World desk of the website.
The episode was an early example of a pattern that would recur for years: a senior editor treating a public reply as a private channel, and the announcement leaking before the announcement.