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

You're so wrong it's not even worth arguing. Bitter will lose. I'm surprised he's not backed down by now. He's going to take it up the ass if he doesn't.

 

My only thought is that the Athletic is covering the legal costs and trying to negotiate some kind of settlement. But they have to know there's no way he keeps the account.

 

Yeah, I would assume The Athletic has got his back with a lawyer. I sincerely doubt he's dumb enough to fight this with his own money.

 

Then why fight it?

Any chance his hiring was contingent upon bringing his account and followers with him?

 

Who is this? Did Frederick get a new account?

 

Frederick obviously had to give up his SJ.com account, and it was taken by Cake.

 

My only thought would be they may be trying to fight it while they try to come up with a technical way to duplicate the followers on another account like what happened when Twitter took the Obama White House account and made a new White House account for Trump with all the White House followers and still maintaining the followers from Obama on an archived account. That was something Twitter did, though, and I doubt there's a way to replicate that without them.

 

Great way to start a job with a new employer. I'm also thinking that he's not backing down because the 27K followers is likely one of the reasons he was hired by the Athletic to begin with.

I'll say this: It's refreshing that the Athletic is sticking with him despite this mess. Most publications would move on.

 

I can't say whether or not it was created as the VP's account, but it definitely was created by Tucker.

 

The "if they want it" part of that tweet pretty much hands the account over to the VP. Seems the understanding was that the VP would keep the account when Tucker left.

I feel for Bitter because none of us were savvy about this stuff in 2011 when he took the beat. That honestly might be his best defense, but even in 2011, journalists were talking about the importance of building a personal brand on social media. He made a bad decision taking over the account rather that way.

 

This is a unique situation, too. Most reporters who manage a company account dedicated to the beat also have a personal account that they simultaneously manage/build for just this purpose. A friend of mine left behind an account with 30K followers when he left a beat, but had about 10K on the personal account he had maintained.

This may not be a case of Bitter not having the foresight in 2011 to understand that he'd one day leave the beat and have to hand back the account he built up -- it may instead be him knowingly trying to leverage that account that was never really his into a better job.