Following high school athletes on Twitter

That's a great piece of advice that can easily be used outside of sports.

 

I follow many of them on my personal twitter and they follow back. It helps gain rapport with them, I think. If they say something on Twitter that I want to retweet from my company account, I simply use TweetDeck and I can do that with two clicks.

 

Twitter and Facebook are excellent resources for keeping tabs on prominent high school athletes. Make sure you conduct yourself professionally in any contact through those media -- identify yourself as a media member, be no more casual than you would in any on-the-record interview situation.

 

I believe you are playing with a cocked and loaded gun following minors. If you do, keep the focus narrow (one or two bonafide recruits) or very board (dozens), and keep it professional at all times. The last thing you want to do is have even the slightest hint of impropriety. If all you are following is a half dozen volleyball players and tweeting directly to them late at night, whether innocent or not, it doesn't look that way. If you have the appearance of a perv or give some emotional 16-year-old girl the wrong idea, you could find yourself having to answer some uncomfortable questions.

 

I follow our local high school athletes, but if I reply to anything they post or interact with any of them, it's in relation to their sport, not anything else. Sometimes they'll want info about a story, or a score from a game, or they'll want to find out how to get a photo from the paper. I have athletes who'll DM me scores from their games and some stats (goals/points mainly) if they know them when coaches won't call with that stuff. I'll still verify it by getting in touch with those said coaches, but it's builds rapport and gets younger people into reading our stories. Sometimes what they say about their sport provides a heads-up on possible story ideas or the mood of a team before and after games. I ignore the venting, all the ask.fm links they post and the stuff about their personal lives and don't get messed up in that stuff.

 

If they are on a public Twitter account, they are not keeping stuff private.

 

Hence, the problem. Prep players are minors.

I pretty use my Twitter account only for blog posts, and I've also aggregated Twitter feeds during the Olympics.

I don't mind that people follow me, but I'm not going to reciprocate unless there's a damn good reason.

 

What, exactly, is the fascination with Twitter?

Why on earth do people want to go blabbing irrelevant (and sometimes potentially damaging) details of their private lives to the world? I see no attraction in that at all. I can see the use for stuff like posting scores and, as one SportsJournalists.com person pointed out, gathering information you may want for your job. But that can also be done via phone, text, email, whatever, like it has been for years.

For those of you who do use Twitter, what purpose does it serve for you?

 

The amount of ignorance I see about Twitter from journalists on here is just staggering to me.

I follow the local police agencies. I follow government officials and agencies. I follow AP and breaking news aggregators. I follow the competition. I follow the producers of our network news feeds. I follow the PIO for our municipal court system. I follow the local sports franchises.

It's an invaluable newsgathering tool.

I also use it to tweet about breaking news and promote what's coming up in my newscast. I'll interact with viewers. In an insanely competitive market, anything I can do to help viewers make a personal connection to my station is a good thing. Plus, it's fun.

Anyone clinging to the notion that they don't need to be on Twitter "because I'm not interested in what someone had for lunch" has absolutely no clue what Twitter is or can be used for.

And as for the main question of this thread: if you write about high school athletes, OF COURSE you should follow them on Twitter. If they're worth covering, they're worth covering well.

 

^^^ ... This

 

exactly. Twitter is a tool that helps you do your job if you utilize it well. If nothing else, it can provide a link to your breaking news stories, provided you still break news. And it gives you exposure. If you are on the Twitter, there are many people who may never even think about buying your paper who may now at least go to your website.
In the mid 90s if more newspapers had embraced the internet and learned to use it effectively, instead of asking what the fascination with the internet was, perhaps our market wouldn't be in as big of a bind as we are now.

 

Ok, fair enough. Thanks. I haven't read it enough to know that people were actually putting stuff out there that I would care to read. It always seemed sort of like electronic stalking to me (not that there's anything wrong with that). But, hey, if there is valuable information out there to be found, more power to ya!