does anyone else just f'n hate live tweeting?

I started my paper's twitter feed two years ago now. We don't post play-by-play, just scoring updates throughout games we're covering.

But when Kentucky is playing, our feed is littered with tweets from seven or eight different folks -- from the Courier Journal in Louisville and the Herald Leader in Lexington -- posting the same information in different ways. It is funny, though, when those same folks are at a presser and you get seven or eight versions of the same quote.

 

Yeah sometimes it's as if beat writers are racing each other with the live event tweets.
"two foul shots coming for jones" 8:58.23
"Jones steps to the line for a pair" 8:58.37

Ill give my next miniscule paycheck to the person who creates a twitter-like feed for running event coverage only. I actually like the idea of writers having two feeds, one dedicated solely to mundane game updates.

 

Whatever happened to CoverItLive? Used that all the time for live games (which no one followed in the pissant area in which I live).

 

Gotta pay for it now.

 

Sometimes we still use CoverItLive for college basketball/football coverage, but mostly relatively live-tweeting. Cut down on it a lot - only tweet out scoring plays/big plays, observations in between quarters/halftime/innings/stoppages (volleyball, soccer) or at media timeouts.

 

No tweeting gameday play-by-play at all here. Undermines our work. People are getting the scores from the radio or watching it on TV or some other media. Seems pointless. In this day and age, being "first" doesn't mean crap 98 percent of the time. Being the best, however, means quite a bit 100 percent of the time.

 

And I despise people who link their live tweeting to their Facebook page.

 

+1

 

I have unfollowed a number of people for excessive tweeting. There is one person in particular who not only tweeted play-by-play of the games he was at -- and I'll say "at" because if you are doing that crap there is no way you are covering the game -- but would also tweet dang near everything that happened on an MLB or college football game he was watching on TV.

 

What I can't stand are tweets like: "OMG, what an awful call" like everybody following that person knows what get they are watching/attending.

 

I will say that I absolutely love following old friends/colleagues during the pres debates and NFL games of a market I used to work in. In an odd way, it's very bonding as we outsnark each other, even though most of us have moved on to different places.

 

You don't tweet during games to be first. You do it to share updates on a different platform. Not every game can be seen by everyone on TV/radio, so there's a value for some people in getting updates via Twitter.