Clay Travis on why every writer/journalist needs to be active on Twitter

Versatile, I'm not picking on you. I really enjoy your posts. This thread features many of my personal all-stars of posters.... that's why I'm all in, doing my arguing thing.

That said, I just read your Peter Casey link.

So this example you've provided of a "star" that Twitter birthed... got that way... by retweeting other people's stuff?

That's the end-goal here? Geeeeeeeeeeeeez.... that's depressing.

 

Maybe there should be a #lugnutsallstars Twitter list.

 

I never thought you were picking on me because, mostly, I've been defending a point of view that I don't entirely share. I agree that journalists should use Twitter, but I think the degree to which they use Twitter shouldn't be set in stone. I think it's absurd to suggest someone should become entirely a Twitter personality when the medium is likely to die quickly once something better comes along (see: MySpace celebrities).

But I do think that Twitter has done a lot for the brands of many, many writers. I would have never read Bruce Arthur's work had I not started following him on Twitter first. His tweets were great, so I followed him. Now, he's one of my favorite columnists. I imagine that at least a couple thousand of his 16,000 followers can say that they had never heard of him before Twitter. I imagine many still haven't read his columns, but he has a brand.

There are a lot of things that annoy me about Twitter. There are the types of posters I cited in my first post on this thread. There are the types of people who throw rumors against the wall and see what sticks, only to have the types of people like JPsT spread their rumors as fact. There are the lunatics and the trending-topic idiots and the spam bots.

I can't stand stories based around tweets. I can't stand references in columns to, "If you follow my Twitter account" (happens more than you'd think, even courtesy of some very, very respected writers). I can't stand the heinous grammar or uncorrected misspellings. I can't stand the lack of accountability.

But I've never been more informed in my life, and Twitter is probably the biggest reason. So I'll defend it. It's an amazing tool, if you know how to approach it.

 

I'm not a reporter, so the only thing I've used Twitter for (I don't even have an account) is to follow Big Brother last summer. Lots of interesting little bites of whimsy, but also a lot of inane and repetitive crap. I couldn't imagine being on it constantly.

 

I was recently asking about a job, and what I heard was that this outlet was interested in hiring a particular guy, at least partly, because he had a lot of twitter followers.

You aren't just generating followers to follow you around to benefit you, but to benefit whoever hires you!

Duh.

 

I think that's Clay's strongest point. That journalists better be using it as a way of protecting themselves. It's survival of the fittest, and Twitter's one way to stay fit.

 

My Twitter followers tend to turn over during the year. I cover two distinct beats -- a DI university and a minor-league baseball team -- so I lose a chunk of followers during the fall and winter, pick up more in the spring and lose some in the summer because the DI school's fans are sick of hearing about the baseball team.

Someone asked me at one point why I didn't tweet when I pitched in on coverage of the rivalry game between the two big state schools. No one follows me for that stuff, so what's the point? I'd probably annoy my followers.

 

Twitter. if used correctly, is a great tool. As a journalist, I'm still not totally sold on it but there's no question that it is growing.

 

Twitter is a loaded gun for an imbecile like Jim Irsay.

 

I for one have no problem with an NFL team being owned by a man who talks like a teenage girl.

 

If I would have been on Twitter, I would have been one of the first to know that . . .

Brett Favre retired in the summer of 2010 and wasn't going to play that season.
Don Shula died.
John Wooden died on May 27, 2010.
Jon Gruden was coming to coach the Miami Hurricanes.

Only those things didn't happen (Wooden died on June 4). And the "lemmings" watching TV news didn't hear those things.

"Dewey Defeats Truman" used to be a once-in-a-generation thing. Now it's daily.

I can't get around this as being a problem. Others, apparently, are fine with it.