Tweeting as a Sports Journalist

In the sports, media, and society blog, the concept the twitter has finally surfaced. The main idea is whether or not the idea of tweeting, re tweeting, or even tweeting at all is a good idea when relating to the concept of information in the sports world. A journalist had mentioned that not acknowledging your twitter is the same as not answering your phone, which then brings the question into play, is using twitter to retrieve and release special information acceptable? Or even if something that is tweeted by someone, should be taken seriously or as a joke?

In the blog they mentioned the freshman quarterback Ron Bolden and defensive coordinator Tom Bradley as an issue in which the use of twitter became a challenge. Different stories were being told about whether or not the player was wanting to transfer and twitter allowed writers and readers to find different articles that gained them more knowledge about the situation.

Unfortunately unchecked tweets made this situation a little difficult as it writers were not aware of Bradley being hired by Pitt and began scrambling for the correct information to give to their readers.

I can relate to this personally as my dad the head amateur scout for the Phoenix Coyotes and had an incident with one of his scouts and tweeting. Apparently the scout would tweet at every game he was at and what players he was watching, which can be an issue if other scouts or NHL teams are following you on twitter. He would also comment on he felt the player performed in that game. This caused many issues and is an example of people in the sports world using twitter in a negative manner.

Twitter has been taken to a new level not just by the writers or journalists, but now by those who work for teams as well as athletes. But now what these people are struggling with is how to analyze twitter and use it to their advantage and how to use their ethics to decide what would be a reliable source to print for readers. Many will try to find guidelines to follow for using twitter as a source, but I believe it will take time and writers may need to rely on actually using research and interviews instead of turning to tweets for information.