2 Responses

1. fox says:

   November 13, 2009 at 8:37 am

   I’m not sold on Twit­ter as a way for jour­nal­ists to dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion for the long-term. I see it as a way to gather infor­ma­tion, get news tips and com­mu­ni­cate with one another and read­ers at times. A fad? I don’t know. A tool, sure.
2. tyjohnson1 says:

   November 13, 2009 at 7:24 pm

   At Tech­ni­cian, we started tweet­ing at the begin­ning of foot­ball sea­son and I’ve noticed the same lack of con­sis­tency in voice.

   I wanted to get beyond play-by-play…
   EXAMPLE: Rus­sell Wil­son runs the ball in from 5 yards out for a touchdown

   …and get to more on-the-fly analy­sis.
   EXAMPLE: That’s Wilson’s 18th career rush­ing touch­down, mak­ing him tied for 7th all-time in quar­ter­back rush­ing touchdowns.

   But after the opener (which I cov­ered and tweeted) other sports­writ­ers I put in charge of tweet­ing var­ied a lot in their tweets.

   When we defeated a team 65–7, the reporter tweeted “Damn, there goes the shutout” when the other team scored late in the game.

   I deleted that tweet, but it made me think about it. Obvi­ously using foul lan­guage is out, but how can I instruct oth­ers on how to tweet infor­ma­tion with analy­sis in less than 140 char­ac­ters on a con­sis­tent basis?

   It brings to light the fact that sports writ­ing isn’t quite objec­tive. In sports, writ­ers often are allowed to con­nect the stats for the reader…

   EXAMPLE: Wil­son had a poor show­ing in the opener, com­plet­ing just 9 of his 33 pass attempts with one touch­down and three inter­cep­tions in the loss.

   …whereas in a purely objec­tive story, read­ers are expected to inter­pret the raw data.

   EXAMPLE: Wil­son com­pleted 9 of 33 pass attempts with one touch­down and three inter­cep­tions in the loss.

   But, as a rule, I would sug­gest sports tweet­ers to imag­ine them­selves as tele­vi­sion or radio broad­cast­ers. The posi­tions are sim­i­lar: both tweets and spo­ken commentary/play-by-play are just words try­ing to paint a pic­ture or pro­vide back­ground information.

   So imag­ine com­bin­ing the col­lege bas­ket­ball play-by-play broad­cast­ing of Brad Nessler with the color com­men­tary of Dick Vitale when some­thing tweet-worthy happens.

   What would Nessler say? What would Dickie V say?

   Nessler: And J.J. Redick comes off a screen and launches a deep three, and it’s good!
   Vitale: Oh my good­ness, he’s on fi-yah! The Cra­zies are rockin’ Cam’ron! Sendek is gonna need a time­out to calm his kids down!
   Nessler: And he does take a time­out, so with four min­utes remain­ing in the half, it’s Duke 42, N.C. State 36.

   So, maybe in tweet­ish it would resem­ble this:

   tech­sports: Another Redick three ignites the sell-out crowd at Cameron, forc­ing Sendek to take a time­out at the 3:58 mark with the score 42–36 Duke.

   It’s impor­tant to find a voice between play-by-play and color. We had a lot of fol­low­ers who fol­low games while they’re AT the game, and since most are tele­vised, you really have to focus on giv­ing fol­low­ers some­thing more than they’re already getting.

   Fol­low me and my staff’s tweets @techsports and @ncsutechnician.

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