The never-ending debate over Twitter is the latest issue examined by the Poynter Review Project for ESPN. In a long piece, including an overly long explanation of Twitter and social media (most of us already get the concept), writer Jason Fry talks to various ESPN folks about Twitter.
Interestingly, he didn’t quote Vince Doria, ESPN’s senior vice-president for news, who called Twitter “a headache” and voiced strong concerns over it compromising journalistic standards in an interview with me.
Also, Fry didn’t detail the latest ESPN controversy over Twitter: NBA reporter Chris Broussard’s handling of Deron Williams and his re-signing with Brooklyn and other stories last week. I think if you’re going to do an exhaustive review of the subject, you need to touch on what’s currently making news.
In fact, I thought the piece barely scratched the surface on what has been written regarding ESPN and Twitter on many other outlets.
At the end of the piece, Fry did question ESPN’s internal policies regarding Twitter. He writes:
We found the biggest sticking point for reporters and analysts is also a source of considerable confusion. ESPN’s latest social-networking policy forbids breaking “sourced or proprietary news” on Twitter, saying that such information “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.”
Some reporters we spoke to repeatedly cited that policy and expressed frustration with it, bemoaning busy times when a news item gets stuck behind other things the desk has to review, allowing competitors to tweet the news first.
However, here’s why ESPN needs to be careful about tweeting news. There’s a passage on Adam Schefter on holding off on a tweet about Tim Tebow getting traded to Jacksonville:
Take March’s Tim Tebow trade, Schefter said. The Denver Broncos agreed to trade the quarterback to the New York Jets, but when the deal apparently fell apart, they tried to work out a trade to the Jacksonville Jaguars instead, only to reverse course and return to the Jets. At one point, Schefter recalled, a credible person involved in the deal told him that Tebow was headed to Jacksonville. Rather than tweet that, Schefter waited to check in with other people — and another credible source told him to hold off.
“The story had changed so much that day, I thought it was really important for me to double- and triple-check it,” he said. “I could have put on Twitter that Tim Tebow was being traded to Jacksonville. Had I done that, I would have been remembered as the guy who got the Tim Tebow story wrong.”
As Doria said in my interview, being right still is what it’s all about.
Rather than function as ombudsman representing the interests of ESPN watchers and readers, Poynter all too often functions as a p.r. representative of the company (albeit with often minor criticisms of the company). There is a reason the article did not mention the Broussard dust-up, and it is the same reason Poynter failed to dig into the Feldman fiasco last year: Poynter seems to want to explain, from the company’s point of view, what the controvery really was, rather than probe, from the reader’s point of view, what could have been done better….