Why ESPN should continue to allow its reporters to break news on Twitter
This week, ESPN’s new social media policy orders its reporter to “not break news on Twitter.” The decision runs contrary to how media should operate in a digital age where people flock to Twitter for the latest news from their favourite reporters.
The new policy goes on to say: “…sourced or proprietary news must be vetted by the TV or Digital news desks. Once reported on an ESPN platform, that news can (and should) be distributed on Twitter and other social sites.” In other words, ESPN reporters can only tweet about news after they’ve written about it for an ESPN.com site. What era are ESPN brass living in?
Let’s say New York Yankees star Derek Jeter is suddenly injured during a game. ESPN’s Yankees stringer Andrew Marchand captures the moment perfectly on his cellphone, snapping a Twitpic of the downed fielder, clutching his leg. Under the new policy, Marchand can’t tell the world about this breaking news via a tweet, but must instead wait to post his story on ESPN.com and then later link to the story on Twitter? That delay could be as long as an hour, which is a lifetime with breaking sports news. ESPN is shooting itself in the foot because people follow Marchand on Twitter for these kinds of updates; not to only read his ballgame recaps.
ESPN must be confident it has enough of a hold on sports journalism to risk alienating its social media fans. Or maybe they’re so hungry for traffic to their dot-com properties they don’t care about delaying breaking news on social media platforms. But they should be considering the chilling effect this may have on their reporters; instead of reporting on important news via Twitter, reporters might just give us boring stats and Twitpics of home runs (wait, is that breaking news?), thus making Twitter a bullhorn for things we don’t really care about. Breaking news makes Twitter what it is, but ESPN doesn’t seem to care.
Sports reporting is a cutthroat business. ESPN is taking a hardline approach by hampering its social media position, something we rarely see in media today. Let’s hope they reverse this decision once they see the many complaints and more than one #ESPNfail