The Athletic keeps growing .......

I had the former reporter at my job at a small weekly who thought he should get to keep the account of our newspaper. Not an account with his name. The actual account with the name of the newspaper.

 

Assuming you mean 2012.

I worked for Media General and then BH Media and created my Twitter account in 2009, basically on my own because the company didn't really care if we were on social media at that time. We did have to add a designation at the end of the handle that we worked for the paper ... (JoeSmithRT, for instance.) I remember there being something in the employee handbook about social media accounts, but since I created it with my own personal email address and not my work address, they didn't ask for it back when I left. I didn't have a ton of followers anyway, maybe 1,500 at its highest.

I just got rid of the designator, and now I'm mostly an anonymous person on Twitter who rambles on incessantly about hockey. I don't put anything work related on there.

 

If the account is registered to a personal email account of Bitter, I'm not sure how the paper can argue that it is their account. If the Twitter account belongs to the newspaper, then it should be easy to get the account back from him, because it should be registered to an email account under their control. If it isn't, then it sounds like this was a case of the previous VT beat writer gifting his Twitter account to Bitter, with the paper a mere intermediary. Whatever the case, it's a waste of lawyer fees

 

The Charlottesville Daily Progress, another BH property, fired Jerry Ratcliffe a couple of months ago, and Ratcliffe has now started his own pay site covering UVa sports. I don't know if he started his Twitter account or if the DP did, but he's basically in the same boat ... a former BH employee using his name and account to encourage UVa fans who read him at the DP to come over to his website.

I'm guessing the account is Jerry's and not the DP's.

 

In that case, I can tell you for a fact that he started it personally with strong encouragement from the Daily Progress' web editor at the time. But there was no company directive to start one and it was registered to his personal email.

 

It'll be interesting to see what a judge thinks. It's entirely possible that the previous VT writer, Kyle Tucker, gifted the account to Bitter. BH Media is arguing that it wasn't Tucker's to give because he started it as a company account to cover VT for the Virginian-Pilot, also a BH Media property at the time.

Bitter initially covered VT for both sister publications, in Hampton Roads and Roanoke, and my guess is that when the Pilot was sold and never asked for the account back, Bitter took it for his own. Either way, a writer and a publication fighting over a Twitter account tells you where we are in journalism in 2018.

 

The Pilot was never a BH paper. Landmark owned both Norfolk and Roanoke, then BH bought Roanoke. Norfolk was just bought from Landmark by Tronc, which also owns Newport News.

 

Expanded soccer coverage and fantasy football coverage announced today.

 

Just waiting for the women’s leagues to start grumbling about inequality in coverage from The Athletic

 

Already happened.

 

The numbers were taken from an WSJ article so I figure those are legit. Won't be surprised if the Athletic becomes the next Movie Pass. I'm surprised they haven't partnered up with Fox Sports for additional revenue streams.

 

The Daily from New York Times bills low eight
figures. Bill probably makes a profit from the revenue from his podcasts.