Shaq's Twitter Legacy
Anyone that tunes in to ESPN Sportscenter can see how drastically athletes on Twitter have changed reporting. I think back a few weeks to Shaq's retirement. As one of the most prolific basketball players of all time retired, most media coverage promoted O'Neil as not only a great player but also a media darling.
Perhaps, sports history will tell a different story. As Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, and Larry King established Twitter as a legitimate broadcast source in their respective fields, Shaq can be credited with making Twitter the largest sports bar in the world. Inadvertently, Shaq may also be credited for making the sports reporter obsolete.
As reporters spent the week gushing about how Shaq gave shout-outs to his favorite members of the press, like Stephen A. Smith during his press conference, did anyone notice how many interviews active players gave regarding Shaq's retirement? Shaq played on teams for 6 franchises with the best player's of our time including Kobe, Lebron, Nash, Dwade, KG, Pierce, Allen, Stoudemire, Hill, Malone, Payton,…… ESPN asked some of our clients for interviews and reporters had zero access to players. The reason was simple…. Twitter. Player's generated their own 140 character or less official statements and ESPN ran screenshots of those statements around the clock. SCREENSHOTS! Instead of interviewing players on air, news channels re-purposed hours-old tweets instead. Today, we receive often incoherent, impulsive 140 character statements, directly from players to millions of fans instantly.
If video killed the radio star, surely the accountants in Bristol are counting the money they will save now that Twitter killed the sports reporter. Salaries, medical benefits, paid vacations, and for what?….so that when news hits ESPN, reporters have inside access. Now a Twittertern and a high-school level writer can feed the story to a broadcaster and journalism is reduced to a stream of tweets with mind-numbing commentary.
This new way of reporting will change over time and true sports fanatics will want more than just a tweet about important stories. But in the meantime, there is at least one group of people who are ready to join the "Big AARP." Watch out grandma, they'll be a lot more journalist playing scrabble at the home next week.
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