Roanoke Times suing former Va Tech beat writer for access to Twitter account

So.....next steps are what? A judge reviews the complaint and counter and then determines whether or not it's worth a trial? Typically, this is where the settlement talks really heat up, but I still don't know what a settlement in this case would even look like.

This is fascinating.

 

Sounds like the Times is screwed, provided the details in the countersuit are verified.

 

If he has the emails from when the login info was sent to him, that makes it a completely different story than the one told in the initial filing. That's pretty much open and shut there. And I'm guessing he wouldn't have filed the countersuit if he didn't have those emails. The only thing that might mitigate it for Roanoke would be if they have emails from back then between their sports editor and Tucker discussing transferring the account to the new reporter. If they don't have some kind of paper trail like that and he has emails, they're screwed.

 

I'm still baffled why the Times is making such a big deal over a Twitter account. Do they actually think that many followers to an account will help drive traffic?

 

You mean the company only gave one side of the story in its initial filing? Who could have possibly imagined that? Certainly a board ostensibly filled with journalists might have been able to sniff that out. Instead, the corporate lackeys were predicting a slam-dunk case for their beloved company. Some of the early posts on this thread have not aged well.

 

It goes back to publications overvaluing Twitter followers. The Athletic, it can be argued, wouldn't be as interested in Bitter covering Va Tech if he didn't have those followers. This is not merely the Times making a big deal, but media in general losing its mind over a following that has not proven to significantly drive online traffic.

 

I bet the click-through rate on Bitter's VT stories for the Times was tiny, because it's tiny for everyone, which is why the whole lawsuit is stupid and petty by the company.

 

This. I loathe the day when newsrooms put "social media following" as a job requirement.

I recently sat through a Twitter presentation. One presenter said hardly any traffic goes to our site from Twitter. Instead, they focused on "impressions" and "engagement."

What's the point of posting so much on Twitter if it hardly brings traffic? More than likely to make a story "viral," which is nothing but a cheap, rat race to drive traffic.

Meanwhile, the people at Twitter are laughing to the bank.

 

I'm just pleased Bitter has a lawyer named J. Benjamin Rottenborn.

 

Ben and I share several mutual friends and have broken bread once or twice. He's a good tennis player and a fantastic guy.

 

Totally true. I run the social end for my magazine and we post to the major socials...and Facebook is the only driver for link clicks. The rest of them might combine for 1.5% of extra clicks to the website.
On Facebook we get a 15-20% click rate...on Twitter, less than 1%.

 

What is interesting is the reporter is suing BH Media for defamation for something the Roanoke Times misreported about the initial lawsuit, not anything related to the ownership of the Twitter account.