MLB

ESPN’s MLB Insiders sort through “the noise” to report the news at Winter Meetings

(Clockwise from top left): Baseball Tonight host Karl Ravech, MLB Insiders Buster Olney, Jayson Stark and Tim Kurkjian report from the 2014 Baseball Winter meetings during SportsCenter. (ESPN)
(Clockwise from top left): Baseball Tonight host Karl Ravech, MLB Insiders Buster Olney, Jayson Stark and Tim Kurkjian report from the 2014 Baseball Winter meetings during SportsCenter. (ESPN)

SAN DIEGO – Twitter has drastically changed the media landscape in recent years.

One of the most tangible examples of this sweeping change takes place at the Baseball Winter Meetings – an annual gathering of Major League Baseball’s and Minor League Baseball’s top executives for a series of industry meetings, trade shows, job fairs, and most importantly to the fans, breaking free agent and trade news.

For ESPN’s nearly 30 MLB Insiders contributing to coverage, it’s a highly competitive, somewhat frantic environment with essentially every MLB reporter on site, all competing for breaking news, tweeting leads and “being first.”

For ESPN’s top Insiders, it’s about being accurate and weeding through the noise.

“Twitter has changed everything about the Winter Meetings and in many ways, it’s now how we tell the story of the Winter Meetings,” said ESPN MLB Insider Jayson Stark @jaysonst. “At ESPN, we don’t break news on Twitter, but all of the little stuff that you hear all day long, if you can corroborate it, Twitter is the perfect vehicle to spread the news.”

Stark continued: “The downside of Twitter is that we’re doing play-by-play to the entire world, every day, in real time. You have to be thoughtful about what you tweet, and I think we are, and that’s one of the great things about working at ESPN.”

MLB fans can check on ESPN.com’s “Winter Meetings Live” page, with a continuously-running social media aggregation tool, collecting ESPN MLB commentator tweets in real-time.

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