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UW Imposes 20-Tweet Limit On Live Events
theodp writes "GeekWire's Taylor Soper reports that the University of Washington has capped live sports coverage at 20 Tweets per basketball game (45 for football) and threatens to revoke the credentials of journalists who dare exceed the Twitter limits. Tacoma News Tribune reporter Todd Dybas was reportedly 'reprimanded' after drawing the ire of the UW Athletic Dept. for apparently Tweeting too much during UW's 85-63 Sunday win over Loyola."
In basketball, usually more points get made than goals get made in football so shouldn't the tweet limit be higher for basketball?
“I think just generally speaking is what we’re trying to do is steer people toward partnerships we have with radio, television and our own web presence,” Moore said. “We don’t want people taken way from that experience.”
that it's supposedly an university.. sounds to me like it's a pro sports team first and everything else second.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
That's between them and their employer, not the organizer of the event they're covering, isn't it?
Can you imagine being asked to cover an event, but only allowed to write 6300 characters about it?
So um... what's to prevent random attendees (or previous credential-holders who have gotten their credentials revoked) from live tweeting the whole game?
But in this case it's not their employer imposing the restriction. It's the University, who don't want people "tuning" into Twitter for a play-by-play - they want them tuning in to the local radio or TV stations that have paid handsomely for the broadcast privileges.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's the private school that restricts it, not the reporter boss. From the article:
“I think just generally speaking is what we’re trying to do is steer people toward partnerships we have with radio, television and our own web presence,” Moore said. “We don’t want people taken way from that experience.”
In plain english: "We have deals with radios and the twitter feeds do not generate revenues, so we decided it was better for us if you cannot follow the games in detail with twitter even if you prefer that over radio."
Tomorrow is another day...
Seriously, This harms ALL sports caster to have the university dictate how things will happen.
if ALL of the news sources would simply skip a couple of games, then the sports director would quickly change their mind.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"..sounds to me like it's a pro sports team first and everything else second."
To me it sounds like the ole 'protect our soon-to-be extinct business model at any costs' no matter how idiotic it is.
This story has a 20 post limit, please stop posting or your account may be revoked.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I believe the tweeting part is more or less related to nerds, enough for you to click and comment. I predict it will gather more interest than the emscripten story posted earlier!
Tomorrow is another day...
Can we upvote this so that everyone who go "that is so stupid, what kind of rationale could there possibly be?" can find their answer straight away?
I just adore the way that the school's PR weasel manages to word it as though those cruel journalists are tearing innocent readers 'away from that experience', rather than admit the obvious "apparently following the game on twitter is more engaging than watching or listening to it, at least as broadcast by our paying partners"...
they cant stop spectators.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Private school? My taxpayer dollars go to fund that particular institution of higher learning via sales tax and property taxes. It is most certainly not a private institution.
Actually, it is a state school which is restricting them. I am curious as to whether this would stand up to a first amendment challenge. Since this involves "credentialed" journalists, who presumably receive free access to the games rather than having to purchase tickets, it certainly might withstand such a challenge.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's the University, who don't want people "tuning" into Twitter for a play-by-play - they want them tuning in to the local radio or TV stations that have paid handsomely for the broadcast privileges.
UW's failure to grasp the realities of the modern world doesn't make a bit of difference.
Although they could revoke the "credentials" of a traditional-media reporter (ironically, the one group they do need to appease for the advertising revenue), how do they plan to stop a "random fan" from tweeting as much as he wants? 20 tweets? That doesn't even come out to one-per-scored-point in most sports. I've seen people send twice that (well, I've only "seen" them text, can't say for sure if they tweeted it) just in the top of the first inning!
Let UW have its little pissing contes - They'll lose, of course, but it might provide some entertainment to watch (cue them learning about the "Streisand" effect at their next game in 3... 2...1...).
People have got to be trained that the only sustainable liberty is managed liberty.
Bandwidth is a precious resource, and we cannot allow our Precious Bodily Phrases to be diminished by more than 20 Tweets per event. People could get excited, and drive up medical expenses.
Of course, managing communications will require a comprehensive regulatory regime. That means jobs. Now, don't get all wrapped around the fact that a day spent poring over Twitter logs and tallying Tweets has no real product. It's a job, and that means a reliable vote from the sucker in the chair.
The act of fining people for Exuberant Tweeting, of course, is a revenue stream of the government. That means more tax agents, bean counters, and a few more lines on the tax code. Don't worry; the tax code isn't predicted to topple until its height exceeds 10,000 meters.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Can you imagine a reporter having their word limit set by the organisation they're covering rather than their own publication? And being asked to write the article as the event occurs, in real time?
And tweet whatever the frak you want. The concept of "journalists" as distinct from "everyone" is just ludicrous now.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Reporters are allowed access to the event with the understanding that their reports will be published after the fact, thus protecting the value of the real-time reporting being done by the broadcast partners. All this rule is doing is telling the other reporters that they can't publish their content in real time.
These new rules are in response to newer technology, but other restrictions have been in place for years to protect licensees.
For example, as a spectator you aren't allowed to video record an event. Often you are not allowed to bring a "professional" grade still camera, either. (Of course, improvements in camera technology are making it easier to surreptitiously get around these restrictions.) The purpose of those restrictions is to force anyone wanting to see video or photos of the event to go to the licensee -- and pay for the privilege either directly or through advertising.
So, yes, it's about the money.
Can you imagine writing an article as a series of tweets?
Sounds very unprofessional.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
That's only because reporters are a reliable way to get the information. Once reporters are capped, that all changes and people will have to find their information from somewhere else. All it would take is a few students to set up a "UW sports tweets" account. There will be a demand for unofficial reporting when official reporting is censored.
Can you imagine writing an article as a series of tweets?
Sounds very unprofessional.
A few months back (August 2012), Cassian Elwes (an independent film producer) posted a series of tweets about his interaction with a distraught veteran on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. (Sorry for the Buzzfeed link, it came from MetaFilter, I swear!)
While it's not Pulitzer-level journalism, the story does emerge reasonably well from Elwes's tweets.
blog
Actually, @Todd_Dybas has a follower count of 436. This isn't a lot. I have over 1,000 followers and regularly talk to people on Twitter whose follower count vastly exceeds my own. Were Todd Dybas and I to attend a game and both live tweet it, would he be kicked out since he's a journalist but I'd be allowed because I'm just a spectator? Or would I be kicked out too for daring to tweet more than 20 times during the game?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Reporter or whoever is talking to me and pauses to tweet "real time" thoughts and the interview/conversation ends right there. I hate it when one person is having a conversation with another person and either of them think it's okay to "check their phone" let alone actually read or type something on it. It's rude. However, what Cassian Elwes did was misuse twitter. It wasn't real time. Putting all the tweets together the story is very poorly written. It's feigned real-time stream of consciousness and I'm sure he thought it added some dramatic effect. In reality, it was just Cassian Elwes not knowing the proper medium to tell a story.
Can you imagine no possessions?
That would make for a very boring football game.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
They understand the 'modern world' perfectly well. They also understand things like 'exclusive contracts' and 'source of income'.
What the 'modern world' needs to learn is that just because you have the ability to do something doesn't mean it is right to do that thing, or that doing that thing has no long-term negative effects. Yes, some idiot can tweet the entire play-by-play. But what do you think will happen to UW's basketball program when it no longer is a source of revenue (or loses even more money than it does now, if that is the case)?
Maybe if their basketball and other sports programs are no longer a source of revenue, the university will go back to focusing on education.
Who cares what the University wants or what TV and radio stations have "paid handsomely" for?
I paid handsomely for my bright pink Hummer H3, but that does not give me the right to demand that my neighbors stop calling me a goof for having bought it or tweeting about my horrible driving.
This relatively new belief that descriptions of a public event are in some way proprietary should be alarming to all of us. Can we bear in mind that the University in question is a public institution?
How far should control over descriptions go? Should people be prevented from describing the shitty meal they got at Olive Garden last night? Or maybe a political candidate should be able to prevent journalists from describing the debate where he was high on booze and pills based upon his proprietary ownership of the content of his own words?
We're going way in the wrong direction treating ideas, words, descriptions - basic building blocks of information - as property. It makes me want to just say that all "intellectual property" is unacceptable.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I read the rationale, it's still stupid. If you're putting on a show, and the value of that show is compromised by Twitter, there's not much value in that show to begin with. Are people going to avoid seeing Bob Dylan in concert because the music reporter tweets the setlist? Are people going to avoid a production of Shakespeare because the theatre critic tweets "Macduff kills MacBeth"? No, the value of these events is in the performance, an experience that can't be communicated through Twitter.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Most colleges have contracts with local TV and radio stations (sometimes national, like Notre Dame). These contracts charge a premium amount for the right to "Live" coverage. Sports Journalists are not given the right to real-time reporting, they have to purchase it. Why? Because the current legal understanding is that college sporting events are not public events, even for public universities.
The Credential Policy for UW specifically mentions that real-time reporting is not permitted.
Credential Holders (including television, Internet, new media, and print publications) are not permitted to promote or produce in any form a “real-time” description of the event.
Who the hell cares if it's a 'public event' or not? Is there some magical law making it illegal to report what someone is seeing at a _private_ event?
Once again, we have the blow-job giving media scared to death of the people they are actually supposed to be reporting on. At least here it's about pointless sports instead of politics, but it's still completely idiotic.
Here is something that everyone in the goddamn universe needs drilled into their head: YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE HOW THE MEDIA REPORTS ON YOU.
The media, en mass, needs to stand up and say 'You can try to set whatever fucking rules you want. We will continue to do whatever we want. You want to revoke our experiential, go ahead, we'll buy tickets. You want to bar us from the stadium, go ahead, we'll send secret observers to rely information to us.'
Not this idiotic nonsense where reporters apparently have to do whatever the university says.
It's especially fucking surreal in this situation, where sports writers are usually some of sports _biggest promoters_. Hell, newspapers could simply say 'If you will not let our reporters do whatever they want, we will REFUSE TO REPORT ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR FOOTBALL PROGRAM.'
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?