Sporting Madness

If anyone wasn’t already convinced that Twitter has altered the way we cover sports, they would do well to consider the events of the past week. First, we had Kevin Love breaking the news [ Andy Hutchins , The Rookies ] of Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Kevin McHale ’s dismissal on his own Twitter feed, followed in close succession by a supposed Twitter feud [ Andrew Stoeten , TheScore.com Blog ] between Chad Ochocinco and Shawne Merriman , Shaquille O’Neal learning of his trade to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Twitter [ King James Gospel ] and several notable reactions across the sports world to the death of Michael Jackson (including some that were over-the-top [ Jonathan Sacks , Sports Rubbish ). Even before this week, many prominent news organizations have been running stories based on information from the Twitter feeds of athletes, agents and coaches, and that doesn’t appear likely to change any time soon. The big question is what these developments mean for sports coverag...

One of the basic tenets of journalism is to always endeavour to tell both sides of the story. Unfortunately, this isn't always possible, but most news organizations try to at least make an attempt and will insert a line like "Organization X could not be reached for comment by press time" if all else fails. This certainly isn't perfect, but it at least shows effort and informs the reader that there may be more to the story. Now, opinion columns and blogging are a bit different, but that kind of writing is usually clearly marked and readers understand what they're getting. Responsible writers and bloggers will generally address comments and factual criticism of opinion pieces as well, and admit it when they make mistakes. The key point, though, is that when something appears as a factual news piece, we usually expect it to include the facts and both sides' perspectives. However, there are some cases where these guidelines aren't followed. Sometimes in cases ...

Everyone and their sister seems to have joined the Twitterati recently, including Steve Nash , Shaq , Will Leitch and Jeff Blair . Normally, I try to resist jumping on the bandwagon, but I saw quite a bit of potential in what Neate has been doing with his feed , especially the links. I'm a long-established fan of throwing out links , but haven't had a lot of time to write those kind of detailed posts recently, so this seems like a good way to get those out along with a few quick observations here and there that I don't have time for an entire post on. Thus, I'll be adding the Twitter feed to the right-hand bar for the time being. We'll see how it develops; feel free to e-mail (andrew_bucholtz at hotmail dot com) or tweet me suggestions on what to do with the feed!