Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC’s multimedia newsroom, meant to send Richard Sambrook a private direct message about two senior newsroom appointments in February 2009. It went out as a public reply instead, visible to everyone following him, and caused what he called “a bit of a flutter in the newsroom”.
Horrocks owned it publicly, telling Journalism.co.uk it was “a very embarrassing cock-up” and that the newsroom was having a great deal of fun at his expense. He also noted a perverse side effect: colleagues who had never seen the point of Twitter began to reconsider once it became a source of internal gossip. He confirmed the appointments in an official email the next morning — Nathalie Malinarich as executive editor of World Online, on a record in World Service news and online as Americas editor and front page editor, and Andrew Roy as head of news for BBC World News, after spells as bureau chief in Washington and Brussels and time at World News. The apology itself went out on Twitter, where colleagues teased him gently: Rory Cellan-Jones wondered aloud whether the whole thing was a ploy to get the BBC signed up, and Bill Thompson whether following Sambrook was the efficient way to keep up with corporation gossip.
The episode was a small study in the unintended consequences of a new tool. Twitter was not built for private messages, but it was being used for quick private exchanges anyway — and the button for one sits next to the button for the other.