NBA ref sues AP reporter for 'defamatory' tweet

This reminds me of the uproar last summer when a certain reporter wrote that a certain major league baseball player was sleeping in his team's clubhouse during a game.

Was it true? Yeah.

Was it helpful to ANYONE to print that? Not really.

Reporters have long been granted access that the general public is not. This is true for other arenas other than sports, of course. The tradeoff is the unwritten rule that reporters will use proper judgment in terms of what they do and do not report.

We've all had someone tell us something off the record, eh? Same principle.

A college I cover has a media policy that everything overheard or seen at practice is off the record. So lets say two guys get in a fight at practice or one kid gets in a shouting match with the coach. OK, if I report that, chances are 100 percent that practices will be closed for the rest of the season and I might miss something even more important. So is it worth it to break the team's rule, even though I'm covererd by the first ammendment? Usually not.

I've heard coaches (and players) cuss and say all sorts of stuff that I don't print. To me, this falls in that same category.

As for Twitter: I'm not saying the technology itself is good or bad. I just see lots of examples of people shooting their mouths off on all sorts of subjects and later wishing they had kept quiet.

 

If you're NOT allowed to report on something seen/heard at practice, why are you worried about missing something important at a later practice that you can't report on in the first place?

And I think it's different when it happens in a game witnessed by multiple media members and thousands of fans.

Would you have reported on John Calipari's verbal in-game rant on Terrence Jones? That wasn't pre or post game press conference stuff, but it was a big-time news story for a while. Of course, had that game been in November or early December on Fox Sports Net or tape-delayed on the Big Blue Sports Network, Calipari doesn't get near the airplay/ink he got for lashing out at Jones.

 

What if a player at that practice pulls a gun on the coach? Do you report it then, or is it off the record?

That sounds like a crap policy you only follow until it's worth it not to.

 

And that practice is closed to the general public to begin with. If it's open to the public, it's open and all information is considered on the record. Very simple distinction. Same thing with a basketball game. If a paying fan can hear what a coach is saying on the floor, it's public information that can be reported.

 

If that is really how you feel:
1 - you don't seem to understand what a journalists does
2 - you should leave this profession immediately

I feel sorry for your readers.

 

Tweeting can be very useful in getting out pieces of new information quickly. However, too many journalists are using the same Twitter feed to opine on the day's hot topic (related to the beat or not), to tell the world where they're going to lunch, to swap an inside joke with a colleague, to complain about how bad their day is, or to retweet something that may or may not be true. It's hard to wade through all the junk to find those actual nuggets of news. Now if people used those Twitter accounts as judiciously as they wrote for the larger product, that would be great.

 

This is another bad blanket statement. Twitter accounts for reporters should be information-first, but they should have personal touches, too (unless the personality behind it is terrible). If helps people invest in your work if they're also invested in you a little bit.

 

Moral: Tweeting can be dangerous.

 

You're deluding yourself if you think that's what people want from beat reporters on Twitter. Readers have no investment in your personality. They want news about their teams. Nobody cares that you're stuck in traffic or had a delicious chicken sandwich or fired off a witty retort to the TV sports guy.

 

In general, you should always tread carefully in printing/reporting/Tweeting something you overheard. Anything said/yelled/screamed in a public forum is fair game, but you better make sure you heard what you thought you heard.

After LSU beat Texas to advance to the Final Four in 2006, Big Baby Davis jumped on the scorer's table directly in front of me, raised his hand to his forehead and barked to the LSU faithful behind us, "Salute me, motherfucker!"

Damn right I used a version of that.

Had I been on the other side of the court, and unsure, I probably would not have.

The other point I'd probably make here is, some things are worth going to the mat over. Twitter isn't one of them.

 

It isn't what they want primarily from their beat reporters, but it is a piece of the puzzle. As we've become exposed to a wider audience, some of that audience has become curious about the people behind the byline.

I get questions all the time about, "Do you fly with the team?" "Where do you stay when you're in such and such?" If I solicit restaurant recommendations in a given city, I'm usually getting more responses than anything else I post.

More than anything, this generation of information consumers desires a dialogue. Mostly about sports, but they're open to other topics.

I'm not advocating overdoing it. Certainly, nobody needs to know about your latest prostate exam. But if you've got something humorous or enlightening to share, I don't imagine the occasional non-sports Tweet.

At the end of the day, it's 140 characters long. If one of your followers isn't into it, it literally wastes half a second of their day. That's it.

 

I agree that it's OK to give a little personal insight in maybe one out of every 20 tweets. If readers like you and feel more connected, they'll keep reading. You just have to be very careful not to overdo it and not to tweet anything even borderline offensive.