For those people who are both Twitter users and sports press readers, you will have noticed many examples of journalism at its laziest since the increasing take up of Twitter by top flight professional footballers. You will have also been within a click of journalism at its best.
You see Twitter is acting as a platform for players to have a voice. They can speak directly to the public, albeit in their often primary school standard grammar. This must frustrate some print media as they are taking potential headlines away from them. They are struggling (or at least failing to recognise that their readers are also quite possibly Twitter members) because they can’t get away with misquoting footballers anymore. Some of the tabloids are that bad now it’s embarrassing. For example, ‘publications’ such as the Metro often just take player’s off the cuff Twitter comments or exchanges and try to make stories out of them. When you have read the actual feed as it unfolded and then read the Metro’s version of it hours or days later it is embarrassing for them. Journalism at its laziest.
However, this is forcing the better sports journalists to up their game, and spend more time as ‘sports writers’ than reporters. I have noticed an increase in blogs and opinion articles as well as just reporting news. We have so many instant news sources now that the real journalistic skill for me is not putting a headline on a Twitter comment that has already been read by thousands of people, but adding some value or insight - taking a current issue within sport and writing about it. These guys spend a lot of time around footballers, managers, coaches and clubs so more often than not we are interested in their opinion. The likes of Oliver Kay (The Times), Henry Winter (The Telegraph) and Ollie Holt (The Mirror), to name just a few, offer some insightful and thought provoking articles.
Twitter is a fantastic platform for these guys to share their writing. It can also be entertaining to view the direct exchanges they have with footballers; past clashes between Ollie Holt and Joey Barton have been particularly interesting to say the least, although they seem to have settled down somewhat lately.
When they aren't trying in vain to get a rise out of footballers (cough cough…Mike Parry) but are using Twitter to either engage with footballers on a public forum, or share each other’s better articles, you can find some great nuggets of information by following these guys. Sports writing at its best.
