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Relating to Twitter’s usefulness as a source of information, the word most often mentioned was “immediacy.” News generally surfaces on Twitter before it does on blogs, websites, or the newspaper. Not only is the news sent on Twitter more quickly, but it is efficiently organized and presented in such a manner that it is received more quickly, as well.

Wise provided a particularly interesting account of the positives and negatives that result from such immediacy:

The immediacy part of it, the get-it-now part of it is seminal in how we look at covering things now in ways good and bad. In the good way, you’ll literally find out from

somebody’s Twitter feed whether Moammar Gadhafi has been toppled, and everything sports-news-related will show up on Twitter often before it shows up on ESPN or in the newspaper or anywhere… The bad part of it and the you-need-be-careful part of it is that

there is no editor. Just as if you were sending an email to a girl that tore your heart out and stomped on it, you’d be sending it emotionally in real time, and months later you probably might regret sending that. But where you were—in that emotional place you were at the time—you said, “Damn it. I’m going to fire this off.” That part of it can be dangerous in many ways. It’s almost like you tell people all the time to think about things before you hit the send button, but Twitter doesn’t encourage you to pause. It encourages you to be faster, more immediate, have the snarkiest, quirkiest, or most entertaining tweet there is, because God forbid that someone else beats you to it.

Another caveat with using Twitter as a source, as explained by Thompson, is that the Twitter feeds of media members almost always provide more useful information than those of players or coaches. Stephenson agreed, “Most of these athletes are not saying very much. But it’s still access and something that’s good to have.” Boyer added that she had never broken a story as a result of something a player tweeted. Said Thompson, “It is sort of a Hail Mary way of

reaching someone you’re trying to get a comment from. It’s probably a pretty low percentage, but all it has to do is work once to be useful.” Davidoff was the most negative in his assessment of Twitter as a source: “It’s not legitimate at all. I’ll joke around occasionally with a baseball person on Twitter, but I certainly wouldn’t use Twitter to try and get real information.”

However, several of the journalists pointed to occasions where Twitter may be a journalist’s only source of a certain type of information. Elliott said that she has seen hockey players saying things that team public relations representatives would not allow them to say in the locker room, or conversing with other players on Twitter. “You’re kind of eavesdropping on them, and that’s kind of fun,” she said. Holder mentioned that football players may post tweets that provide rare insight into how they are recovering from injuries, or agents may post updates

on contract negotiations. Stephenson said that the only response he could get from former Nets player Derrick Favors when he was recently traded to the Utah Jazz was via Twitter, because Favors was not answering his phone.

In Denver, Jones has been very close to what is being considered a revolutionary use of Twitter by the Broncos front office. New Executive Vice President of Football Operations and former quarterback John Elway has recently begun tweeting under the name @JohnElway to announce major team news, such as the firing of coach Josh McDaniels, the hiring of coach John Fox, and the re-signing of star player Champ Bailey. “That is completely unheard of,” Jones said. “Usually if you’re covering a coaching search, you’re tracking plane tail numbers and super-off-the-record sources about who’s coming in and when they’re interviewing… It’s been weird from a beat-writer perspective, because we want to break all the stories. I don’t want the team releasing the information. But at the same time, it’s also nice to have the official

confirmation right there.” Though it is too soon to tell if the Broncos social-media strategy will catch on, such a development would only make Twitter that much more important as a tool for sports journalism.

Additionally, Twitter can be used as a source of information from readers. Thompson mentioned that The Wall Street Journal does a morning roundup of the previous day’s most interesting stories (“The Daily Fix”). He said that if he and his colleagues are ever unsure of what story to lead with, Twitter serves as the tiebreaker, “It’s not a coincidence that since I’ve started to check the [Twitter] feed every morning, traffic for “The Daily Fix” has gone up. I don’t think those two things are unrelated.”

4.6 Twitter as an outlet for journalistic content

Where immediacy is a factor for journalists using Twitter as a source, and it certainly is as well for journalists using it as an outlet for their own work, the other major hallmark of Twitter—“brevity”—seemed to come up more often in relation to this second usage. Holder offered a characterization of sports journalists that was echoed by several of his colleagues: “One of the things that every sports writer will tell you is that they never have enough space. You’re always begging your editor for more inches in a story. So, to go to that group of people and tell them that you’ve now got 140 characters is one hell of a dilemma.” Several of the journalists mentioned having trouble dealing with brevity constraints, in addition to the fact that stringing together two or three tweets to get a single point across is a generally frowned-upon practice.

Though Twitter does offer the possibility of expanded tweets beyond 140 characters, as Buker pointed out, the brief nature of Twitter dialogue causes some, like Wise, to doubt its usefulness as a source. “I still find researched and edited and written stories to be the most effective in terms of research and preparation [for columns or the radio show], because the bottom line is people actually prepare that, and you can only get so many bits of information in 140 characters even if you tweet 20 times.” On the other hand, Davidoff said that he finds Twitter’s brevity constraints somewhat refreshing, “We all talk too much and write too much, so I like that Twitter restrains you.” Furthermore, Thompson noted the difficulty in comparing Twitter as an outlet to the printed newspaper as an outlet, because the data that is available does not line up. He also said he believed that Twitter had net yet become as important as a source as Facebook—“You’re more likely to get a bump from some story catching fire on Facebook than you are from Twitter”—but was the only journalist interviewed to make such a claim.

Where Twitter seems to have as its greatest value as a source is in upsetting traditional gatekeeping hierarchies, as mentioned above by Elliott. Similarly, Jones said, “Our editors obviously want everything on our site first, but sometimes that’s not exactly feasible. Because Twitter is instantaneous, I can type directly from my fingers, and it goes out to over 13,000 people immediately. If I send it to our web editor, it might take 20 minutes for somebody to look at it and format it and stick it up on our site.” Davidoff added, “When I have breaking news, I can just tweet it first, and then put it on my newspaper’s website. My newspaper is fine with that.” Perhaps for this same reason, Twitter is also redefining the traditional notion of the

“scoop.” Stephenson expressed frustrated that due to gatekeeping practices in the newspaper business, online-only journalists, such as those writing for ESPN.com or YahooSports.com, more frequently have the scoop and break news. At the same time, due to the immediacy of Twitter, being the one to have the scoop or break the news is not as prestigious as it once was.

Stephenson said, “In the old days, if a guy had the scoop in the paper, you had to wait until the next day before you could address it, chase it, follow it, improve on it. Now, if a guy has the scoop, you can get something up 10, 15 minutes later. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, because in the newspaper business you want to have the scoop. But now you have the scoop for 10 minutes, as fast as somebody can type something up.” Thus Twitter is instrumental in a redefinition of breaking news.

Another redefinition Twitter seems to be playing a part in is that of the role of a sports reporter. The journalists interviewed characterized the dialogue that takes place on Twitter as sometimes being “clever,” “entertaining,” “flippant,” “funny,” “humorous,” “quirky,” “snarky,”

among other terms. The common bond between such terms seems to be a lack of seriousness that perhaps parts with more traditional forms of journalism. Though oftentimes there may be a clear

delineation between tweets that are comedic in nature and those that are journalistic, at least one of the journalists interviewed—Holder—went as far to hypothesize that Twitter is playing a crucial role in a redefinition of what it means to be a reporter that has been taking place for some time now. Holder explained, “I’m 35, and I went through journalism school in the ’90’s, and it was always made very clear to us that if you’re a reporter, and not a columnist who writes editorials, then you don’t offer your opinion. That’s changed. That changed a long time ago, and Twitter really just blew that out of the water.” Whether it is called “opinion,” or perhaps nuanced as “analysis,” which Holder said he prefers, he said traditional rules about whether that type of writing is allowed by reporters have changed with the transition from print to the Internet to the point where, on Twitter, there “are no rules.”