Started hearing about this tonight on Twitter and it appears to be confirmed that MLB.com has ordered its beat writers to stop tweeting non-baseball issues on their accounts. I don’t know if this has anything to do with what Peter Gammons has been tweeting in regards to politics or music, but this new policy was apparently handed down today.
This is similar to when ESPN cracked down on its staff Tweeting last year and established a new social networking policy.
Aaron Gleeman of NBCSports.com and Rotoworld.com has apparently confirmed this and says the new policy is unfortunate. However, it appears that MLB does not want non-baseball tweets to appear in its main Twitter feed. Gleeman adds that MLB has scolded players for Tweeting which is just ridiculous.
This brings writers and players closer to their fans and by not allowing them to Tweet non-baseball stuff smacks of censorship. Before the policy, we got to see writers’ personalities, their likes and dislikes and in the case of Peter Gammons, interesting musical tastes.
John Ourand of Sports Business Journal says Baltimore Orioles MLB.com beat writer Britt Ghiroli is only allowed to tweet about the Orioles and nothing else. Britt had used her account to talk about her beloved Michigan State Spartans, but now all of those tweets are expunged. Too bad.
Hopefully, MLB.com will reverse this policy and realize fans like the interaction with writers through social networks. And there’s no need to crack down on players either.
It’s all very silly.
