Twittering games

Just curious, what are the policies any of you are encountering in various pressboxes, practice fields, etc. when it comes to twitter and/or live blogs.

anyone using or planning on using twitter extensively in your coverage?

 

We give scoring updates as often as we can during games. That's about the extent of our game Twitter coverage, though if any breaking stuff happens (injuries, et cetera), we'll report that as well.

 

We haven't encountered any policies in the high school ranks. We're in the third week of the HS football season here, and we've hit the Twitter updates pretty hard. We've either tweeted or re-tweeted every scoring play for every game played in our county so far.

 

We do score updates at the end of every quarter for football games and scores on the others at the end of the game. We also post our stories at the end of the day with links to our Web site.

Haven't had anyone complain about it yet, but I've only done one high school game.

 

I think this opens up a great debate for media vs. Sports Info front office folk in the NCAA and pros. Anyone with a smartphone, iPhone or internet anything can "tweet" about whatever.

What if Johnny wants to tweet about the game to his friends while he is in the stands? Every inning, quarter, period? Every score? Every play?

I know a lot of these schools and leagues are trying to do away with live-blogging because they think it takes away from people going to the "team sites" but what if everyone is doing it? Some season ticket holder in a suite could easily update his tweet after ever play this NCAA football season but us media guys can only update it three times a quarter or 5 times a half or whatever it is now.

An interesting debate to have indeed.

 

When you cover "big schools" that can't even draw 1,000, you know, we just don't even think about stuff like this.

 

I'm hearing the same issues on my beat -- any limitations you put in the press box basically hinder someone by credentialing them. They can't control tweets in the seats, but they can ask you not to live-blog so more people go to the official live blog during a game ...

 

Nobody at the schools we cover, care that we are Twittering.

 

On the pro and college stuff, I think it's dumb to try to give play by play. That's available elsewhere, so you should be giving analysis and stuff that isn't. Preps are obviously different.

 

I text, blog, email, talk. But I'm just not into Twitter. And I'm wondering if it isn't some fad that will sooner rather than later fade into oblivion while its originators count their profits. Just don't see any substance, and certainly very little context.

 

I think there's a much better chance of somebody with deeper pockets making a more reliable, beginner-friendly version of Twitter than it fading away.

 

You're not doing it right.