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Dave Kindred on Twitter

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Evil Bastard (aka Chris_L), Jan 28, 2011.

  1. clintrichardson

    clintrichardson Active Member

    I think Kindred is off by a degree or two when he writes "Not one of the players quoted knew anything more than the guy scratching his crotch at the next bar stool." Because the players do have the insight of having played in the NFL with injuries, and having had teammates who played with injuries.

    Obviously the missing piece of information is knowing exactly how badly Cutler was hurt, how much pain he was feeling, etc. But they are at least one meaningful notch up from the guy scratching his crotch at the next bar stool.

    And theoretically their experience would have made them MORE open to sympathizing with Cutler, not less.
     
  2. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    In addition to whether the tweets were newsworthy (they were), Kindred could have gotten into just how and why they got so much play. There's one reason and one reason only: PFT. Every other reporter just mimicked what was up there; a few of them bothered to get one or two tweets from elsewhere, but for the most part nobody did any further legwork. I would seriously doubt, in fact, whether many of the writers who saw it on PFT even clicked on the actual Twitter feed. It was a storyline delivered right there in the press-box buffet line, and those stories always win out.

    Pack journalism. So in that light it has happened plenty of times previously, only "there are whispers" has become "there are tweets."
     
  3. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    I'd say it's pretty similar to my stance on the ridiculous "A-Rod can't hit in the postseason" stuff.
     
  4. YGBFKM

    YGBFKM Guest

    Not if they're just regurgitating the conventional "wisdom" perpetuated by the media. And that makes this story even more frustrating. The media shape an opinion on an individual, fans and players run with that opinion, then the media turn right around and say, "Well, I'm just reporting what these athletes said." No, you're irresponsibly "reporting" the kne--jerk ramblings of individuals who are just following your lead to begin with. Bullshit begats bullshit.
     
  5. Double J

    Double J Active Member

    Well, what is "reporting," after all? Is it not telling a story about what is happening, ie. a player getting ripped on social media, a public forum, by his peers?

    I don't know enough about the issue to be able to say whether or not the players in question were indeed "following the media's lead," but my instinct is to not believe that. There may well have been a pack mentality at play, but I doubt the media - and, golly, I just love it when we're all grouped together in one all-encompassing generalization! - has that much influence on how a number of tweeting NFL players feel or already felt about Jay Cutler, or on how they choose they express those feelings.
     
  6. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    I think you're going to start to see no-Twitter clauses in player contracts. The injured Packers who are pissed about not being in the team pic is another example of guys speaking before they think, which is great for us but not so good for the teams. Knowing how these tin-hat dictators run everything else, they'll clamp down.

    I also wonder how many of these players even want to keep tweeting after the 3-6 month mark. Once they realize it isn't bringing them the marketing revenue they were promised, they'll wise up.
     
  7. YGBFKM

    YGBFKM Guest

    The media have plenty of influence over people in general, and especially the dumb ones.
     
  8. Dave Kindred

    Dave Kindred Member

    Newberry does good with it....
    Sorry to copy it all, but couldn't do a link from Nexis...
    *****************************************

    By PAUL NEWBERRY

    AP National Writer

    OMG!!!! Whatup w/ everyone tweeting all dat hate about Jay Cutler??!!

    The latest evolution in the constantly moving target that is social media came barreling at us in 140 characters or less last weekend, when the Chicago quarterback was ripped by current and former NFL players on Twitter for leaving the NFC title game with a not-so-apparent knee injury.

    Turns out, Cutler was indeed hurt.

    DaBears say Cutler sprained MCL. Take that haters!!

    Not that it mattered. Not with everybody's real-time comments on every play getting launched into cyberspace with the a few taps on fans' smart phones and a click of the "Tweet."

    "In the past, those were things that players would have turned to people watching the game with them in their living room and said from the privacy of their couch," said Scott Minto, director of the sports business program at San Diego State University. "Now, with social media, that whole barrier is taken down."

    The brouhaha erupted after Cutler left the game against the Green Bay Packers early in the second half. When he was later shown standing on the sideline, in no apparent pain, Twitter was a handy conduit for those watching from the comfort of home to question whether he was hurt all that bad.

    "If I'm on chicago team jay cutler has to wait till me and the team shower get dressed and leave before he comes in the locker room!" tweeted Arizona defensive lineman Darnell Dockett, whose team didn't even make the playoffs.

    Jacksonville running back Maurice Jones-Drew, who played 14 games with a partially torn meniscus in his left knee before shutting it down, first compared Cutler to former Florida coach Urban Meyer, who resigned in December, then wrote: "All I'm saying is that he can finish the game on a hurt knee ... I played the whole season on one."

    Former players Deion Sanders and Mark Schlereth, who now work as television analysts, also took shots at Cutler. The Bears wound up turning to third-string quarterback Caleb Hanie, who led a comeback that fell just short, the Packers advancing to the Super Bowl with a 21-14 win.

    Jones-Drew apologized for his tweets, claiming he was merely trying to poke fun at Meyer and the Gators, only to have his followers take it the wrong way so much so that he received death threats from Bears fans.

    "Twitter is big, maybe bigger than anything else these days," Jones-Drew said. "The problem is people don't know when you're joking and when you're being serious. They thought my tweet was a shot at Cutler, and when I tried to make it right, it completely backfired."

    Even so, he has no plans to change his social-networking habits.

    "No matter what happens, I'm not going to stop tweeting," he said. "I should be able to say what I want and share my opinions without getting death threats, though. I still don't get why people attacked me like that. I've never attacked anyone and never will."

    U aint gettin me to back down! MJD dont roll like dat!!

    Houston running back Arian Foster has a Twitter account but said he would never accuse of another player of faking an injury or not being tough.

    "There's no way you can ever measure another man's amount of pain," he said at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. "I know Jay Cutler. I played against him in college. He's tough. So I don't question him at all. If people do, that's their prerogative. But as an athlete, it's hard for me to criticize another athlete because I know all the scrutiny we go through. We get it from you guys (the media), so it's hard for me to do it to them."

    That was perhaps the most interesting twist in the whole Cutler affair.

    The relationship between athlete and journalist is often a testy one, with the potential to turn downright ugly when someone up in the press box writes or says something critical about a guy down on the field. Sanders, in fact, once poured a bucket of water on player-turned-broadcaster Tim McCarver's head because he was upset about comments made on the air.

    Good 1, prime time! be great if Twitter had dunkin feature. LOL!!!

    Boy, is that shoe on the other foot now.

    "It's a little hypocritical," said Joe Mahan, an assistant professor with the Sport Industry Research Center at Temple University who focuses on social media. "You hear complaints all the time about how, 'Hey, you're just sitting there behind a laptop writing a news column. You don't know. You can't see from the press box what we go through.' But now, we've got a lot of former athletes crossing over to sports media, being on ESPN and all these other outlets. They're doing it themselves."

    Cutler's teammates and plenty of other players lashed back at his detractors for speaking out of turn and, if nothing else, breaking the unwritten NFL code about questioning someone's toughness in public. Bears coach Lovie Smith said the team's medical staff made the call to pull Cutler out because of a sprained medial collateral ligament in his left knee. Smith, in fact, said Cutler might not have even played in next Sunday's Super Bowl if the Bears had won.

    Others turned their focus on the mainstream media, wondering if it was partly to blame for giving so much attention to the hastily composed ramblings of a few.

    Longtime columnist Dave Kindred was among those who called out the coverage of the story (in complete sentences with nary a hashmark), not so much what had been tweeted in the first place.

    "Not one of the players quoted knew anything more than the guy scratching his crotch at the next bar stool," Kindred wrote. "None had any connection to the Bears coaching staff or medical staff. There was no reason that any of them would have been searched out for a quote on Cutler. Yet their social media attack was reported as news even inside gamers and columns written in the stadium that day.

    "News? Oh, please."

    Dude dont know what he's talkin about. Tweetin is big time!!!

    Wayne Norman, a professor of ethics at Duke University who blogs about the sporting culture, also called on the media to reassess the intense focus given to social media posts that are, by their very nature, snap judgments with often no basis in fact, especially when they wind up overshadowing a pair of thrilling conference championship games. (Pittsburgh is the Packers' opponent in the Super Bowl, having held off the New York Jets 24-19 for the AFC title.)

    "If they took all the Twitter feeds of all the players and former players, there's a zillion things out there every single day," Norman said. "If they wanted to make a story out of any of them, they could. My question is: On the day after two amazing games from what some people consider the greatest football day of the year, why decide that people are much more interested in gossipy, kit-katty name calling rather than actually on the game?"

    Then, he considered his own question.

    "The depressing thing is," Norman quickly added, "it may well be that most sports fans don't care about the strategically interesting things of sport. In the end, maybe they do care more about personalities and wars of words."

    Kansas City quarterback Matt Cassel prefers to play it safe.

    He's not on Twitter and has no plans to be.

    "I'm just not into that kind of stuff," the Pro Bowler said. "I've got a phone, and if I need to talk to somebody, I'll talk to him. It's easy to do it that way."

    Good idea, MattyC! Dont want A Cromartie31 to smash ur face in!!

    Cassel, though, is part of a rapidly dwindling group. There's no turning back from Twitter and Facebook and whatever comes along next. (Heck, they may have invented something since you started reading this old-fashioned story.)

    A year from now, as we're all sitting down to enjoy another set of conference championships games, it may be commonplace for one player to rip on another for the world to read.

    "These are young guys with a lot of money and a lot of confidence. Maybe even borderline arrogance. They're going to say what they feel," Mahan said. "The teams want them to hold the party line. That's what they're coached to do by the PR folks. But when they have at their fingertips an up-to-the-second, Twitter-type communication, that's just way too tempting."

    Gotta run. Need to send another Tweet!!!

    AP Sports Writers Mark Long in Jacksonville, Fla., and Jaymes Song in Honolulu contributed to this report.
     
  9. Double J

    Double J Active Member

    "The media" does not speak with one voice.

    But it can, and should, report the facts.

    Several NFL players used social media to publicly criticize a peer during a championship football game in which he had been playing - fact.

    Many journalists, as they should have, reported this fact.

    Criticizing "the media" because these journalists did their job is far from irresponsible. It can plausibly be argued that it would have been irresponsible for a journalist to be aware of what was happening and not report on it, or at least support the reporting done by others.

    Even if the tweets in question were indeed "knee-jerk ramblings," they were still worthy of reportage. To claim otherwise is asinine.

    Look at it this way - would/should you report the "knee-jerk ramblings" of a prominent politician who used a public forum to criticize a colleague or some other public figure? Sure you would/should - why not?

    The context, if any, may be very relevant. Perhaps the politician's ramblings were spot on. Perhaps they were from out in left field. Perhaps he or she spoke out because he or she was off his or her meds. Who knows? The point is, it would all be secondary to the fact that the politician had rambled.

    Our job, first and foremost, is to report the news.
     
  10. YGBFKM

    YGBFKM Guest

    Context is my problem. There was more to the story than the content of the tweets. There's a bigger picture here. I feel like many of the writers charged with giving some context used the Tweets to take the easy way out.
     
  11. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Members of the media chooses not to report "facts" every day.

    Hiding behind "well, it's a fact we had no choice" is not a defense.

    I can pretty much say for certain that every time some random politician spouts their mouth off on a random subject, it isn't news. They do it for the publicity and the newspeople choose not to give into them.
     
  12. Piotr Rasputin

    Piotr Rasputin New Member

    A link to Newberry's oh-so-clever column (ha ha, ho ho, heehee, his little Twitter-like asides have my side splitting!):

    http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/football/omg-players-ripping-players-takes-our-140-character-world-in-a-whole-new-direction-114847064.html
     
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