ESPN: No tweeting about sports for 48 hours

Good. I have absolutely no use for that whatsoever. I don't see what people's fascination with it is.

 

Not really. A quick sampling of the top 25 Fortune 500 companies that tweeted about Newtown:

No. 2: https://twitter.com/Walmart/status/279701238680018944
No. 3: https://twitter.com/Chevron/status/279716075782946817
No. 10: https://twitter.com/HP/status/279688086340923394
No. 11: https://twitter.com/ATT/status/279671601337884673
No. 14: https://twitter.com/McKesson/status/279696352949202945
No. 18: https://twitter.com/CVS_Extra/status/279679083741327360
No. 25: https://twitter.com/FreddieMac/status/280501337714720768

But those are major national corporations — maybe some of them had a connection to Newtown in some way, but I'm guessing most did not.

The ones that really don't make sense to me are the posts from random, unrelated companies from far away:

A health club in Florida: https://twitter.com/OrlandoWELL/status/280486828639924225
A restaurant association in Ohio: https://twitter.com/MiamiValleyRest/status/279700142469300224
A hotel/resort in Arizona: https://twitter.com/SVHresorts/status/279667003277586432

There's thousands of others just like them, of course.

What purpose do these tweets serve, other than to draw attention to your company and "humanize" them? It's just bad form. Want to express your condolences on your personal account? Go right ahead; everyone else is saying the exact same thing. There's really nothing else you can say about something like this. But I think it looks terrible for a company to mention a mass murder 2,000 miles away and then, hours later, go back to tweeting about their deal of the day and promoting their products. Maybe that's just me, I don't know.

 

How many times does one need to read/hear.....

"Such a tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families."

OK, fine, we get that. We've heard it about a million times already.

 

Crap. Reconsidering my position now.

 

It's about geography. People who work for ESPN drive through Newtown all the time. (It's on I-84, which leads to New York).

Close to home.

And this one was arguably the worst because of numbers and ages.

 

Sorta related.

My rag rarely runs breaking news emails/banners on main site. Usually weather related or major news in our 25K town (new factory bringing 100s of jobs, death of a mayor, shooting, etc.).

So today, when I hadn't been on the site, I log in to correct an error. And what is our breaking news?

"(Local Hospital) to shut off its Christmas lights tonight to honor shooting victims"

 

That is Major League Lame-o in big fucking type.

My God. What a spectacular gesture. Somebody call CNN.

 

Breaking news, indeed. :