Top sports writers to follow on Twitter

IMO Twitter is good for two things, breaking news and wisecracks. Writers who're good at either or both of those are worth following. Otherwise, no.

 

Greg Bedard does a great job with social media updates.

 

This list is useless. As Chris Jones tweeted when he sent this link out last night, he's got the (second) fewest followers on the list at almost 11,000. What's the use of a list like that? There's only one: hits. You pick 50 of the top sports journalists in terms of Twitter followers, praise them for having a lot of followers, hope they retweet the link and watch the clicks fly in.

Many of these people aren't really great tweeters as much as extremely popular tweeters. I'd guess 95 percent of those who see this list will already be following 75 percent of those listed. A list of 50 excellent sports tweeters with fewer than 5,000 followers would be far more useful.

 

Does anyone follow Dave Sheinin? He has amassed over 2,500 followers without ever tweeting a single thing. I guess everyone's just following him, waiting to see what words of wisdom he will utter. Kind of like the runners following Forrest Gump.

 

If he never tweets, there is no drawback to following him.

 

I wonder who has the most. I think Schefter is around 1.5 million.

 

That article said Schefter had the most at 1.5 million. Then, a few names down, it says Simmons has like 1.66 million, something like that. Weird.

 

I think that's a valid argument. I think there would certainly be some value in another list of the best 50 or so writers with fewer than 10,000 followers. You could probably make lists for either major city too.

But there are a lot of much bigger names than Jones that were left off. I think both John Clayton and Jemele Hill have hundreds of thousands of followers and weren't on there. I'm sure there are others that are also 100,000+ and were left off.

 

Agree with this a lot too. If you are covering a small team or a game that isn't televised go right ahead and live tweet, but live tweeting the Super Bowl play by play isn't exactly what I'm looking for on my Twitter feed.

 

I don't think there's a real audience. The audience for this post is one that already follows 75 percent of the people on the list and chooses not to follow 15 percent of the list. So you're giving readers, if my numbers are close, five new people to consider following.

 

Jenna Fryer should be on there.

 

If a sportswriter has fewer than 5,000 followers it's almost guaranteed their tweets are strictly regional, and putting them on a list would be a waste of time. Random example: I follow Rob Moseley of the Register-Guard because he's the beat writer on Oregon football. He does a very good job, but there's no particular reason to follow him if you don't care about the Ducks... and he has 12,000+ followers.