Trafford Council bans MEN from tweeting crucial council meeting

MEN Media was last night banned from using Twitter to cover a crucial local planning meeting held by Trafford Council.

The group has been using the microblogging tool and liveblogging software CoveritLive since to December to send minute-by-minute updates from full council meetings in Trafford, Manchester and Bury. In February it extended its coverage to include full council meetings of all 10 local authorities in the Greater Manchester area.

But Councillor Vivienne Ward said she did not wish news to be tweeted from last night's meeting, at which plans for the future of Old Trafford cricket ground were announced.

A liveblog of the meeting did, however, feature Twitter updates from members of the public attending the meeting, giving them the opportunity to break news of any decisions made, and images from the MEN.

"[B]y and large, councils have welcomed the live coverage as a way of granting greater access to local democracy. This is the first time the MEN has been told it cannot tweet from a local authority meeting and we can only hope this is will be a temporary backwards step," writes Paul Gallagher, head of online content at MEN, in a blog post on the Evening News' site.

In his post Gallagher acknowledges that policies on Twitter can vary between authorities, for example, in Salford members of the press can tweet during meetings, but councillors cannot.

"Decisions about any broadcasts from a Council committee are at the discretion of the chairman of that committee," Trafford Council told Journalism.co.uk in a statement.

"In the course of any planning committee meeting the chairman requests that all mobile devices be switched off. This is to avoid distracting participants or members of the audience and to avoid any disturbance to proceedings."

This is not the first time a regional authority has effectively banned the use of Twitter and other live reporting tools: last month, as Guardian Cardiff reported, the Lord Mayor of Leeds banned the use of electrical equipment at a full council meeting.

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