Because nobody reads the paper on Presidents' Day ...

Ever heard of networking? That's essentially what you're doing when live-tweeting a game. Communicating with others interested in the game can draw attention to the print product. The problem is, too many reporters don't know how to get the most out of Twitter. Play-by-play is one of the worst ways to tweet during games, almost as bad as doing play-by-play in a gamer. Stats or interesting facts about players or teams that most people probably aren't aware of. That's the types of things I like to tweet about during a game or when previewing or reviewing a game. Can be harder to come by in preps, but it's possible to do if you look enough.

Also, I like to view myself as a journalist more than just a print journalist. I'm still reporting on the game, no matter what platform I use. The print edition is going to be killed off eventually, whether I tweet during a high school football playoff game or not.

 

#hottakes work.

 

Happytown sophomore WR #LongDuckWang14 already has four children by three seniors! #hsfbfriday

 

I don't know how many touchdowns he has, but he sure can score.

 

For a tenth-grader, he definitely can go the distance. #yesyesyes

 

Not quite what I was going for, but sure.....

 

Continuing off topic, but it's really not that hard to build enough info to send out good tweets, or if you don't use twitter, add good nuggets to a story. Even just game-by-game/season stats. If you're organized, they shouldn't be too hard to compile. If you're at the college level, you get the official stats from the school and its that much easier. Then, you're able to write things like " This was Joey's fourth 100-yard game of the season" or "It was a career-high 32 points for Johnny."

Too often, I see writers only focus on the current game and not see the bigger picture. That's why you end up with play-by-play gamers and tweets.

Then again, I'm a research/numbers guy, so maybe I missed the mark and I'm the only one who finds things like that useful.

 

No, MN. I think you have the right idea.

 

Networking? You could tweet once before the game and several times after the game once all your copy is in the paper or on the Website; then you could uh, link to it. Linking to your copy is THE ONLY somewhat valuable part of twitter and that's not necessary cause any "fan" on twitter knows who the beat writers are, if that beat writer is worth a shit or who the columnists are if that columnist is worth a shit. Twitter is NOT VALUABLE at all to a news organization. it's another myth of the geeks who ruined this business.

 

Because I think it fits in this thread ... here's a blurb from Poynter about how non-media folks get their news. There's about 12-15 quotes from their survey, and (no surprise) none of them say they read a newspaper or watch local TV newscasts:

How people who don’t work in news consume their news | Poynter.