LOS MEDIOS COMO AGENTE FORMATIVO

The journalists were asked to describe how they use Twitter on a day-to-day basis, as well as to evaluate how successfully Twitter fulfilled two particular uses—as a source of

the journalists mentioned Twitter’s omnipresence, as it is the first thing they look at in the morning and the last thing they see at night. “It really kind of dominates my life,” Stephenson said. “We’ve always worked in a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week business, but never more so than now with Twitter.” Stephenson went on to describe Twitter as a “necessary evil,” with the evil being the constant pressure of what might be best described as an 86,400-second-a-day news cycle. Holder added, “I think it’s been overwhelmingly positive in helping me do my job, but it’s also made it a little more stressful, because I feel like I’m tethered to it.” In addition, Jones mentioned that her routine used to begin with checking websites like ESPN.com and

ProFootballTalk.com, which were particularly relevant to the NFL, but now she goes to Twitter to get all of that information in one place. Holder suggested that such a change in routine is not only affecting journalists, but readers, as well: “I read recently that people used to go to a

handful of websites each day or on a regular basis, but nowadays they search for things and they go to them that way or they get them through another website, which in many cases is Twitter.”

As the journalists recounted a typical day’s work using Twitter, their routines varied quite a bit. Among those who considered themselves to be not-so-frequent Twitter users were

Stephenson, Thompson, and Wise, who all cited different reasons for such an approach.

Stephenson pointed again to an “old-school” mentality: “Let’s say four of us or five of us are in a group-interview setting, and we all get the same stuff. Well, I’m going to go back to my laptop and start writing that for my newspaper’s website, for the blog. Somebody else is going to tweet it. So I see this guy tweeting something I already know, and now I have to tweet it, but, of course, I got it up second, or third, or fourth, as the case may be.” Thompson cited a kind of fatigue that comes with constantly being bombarded with updates every second of every day, “I’m not out there all day long with my thoughts. I just have other stuff to do, and I kind of feel

like as a user, I kind of get a little exhausted when people are on there tweeting something every 10 minutes. I think some people do it well, but others don’t, and it just gets a little tiring.” Furthermore, Wise added that he has never been consistent in his usage of Twitter, as he only tweets when he’s “engaged,” whether that is because of something he is promoting for his newspaper column or radio show, or something that has become a popular topic of discussion amongst his followers.

Among the more frequent users, Holder estimated that he has his Twitter feed up at least 75 percent of the time that he’s on his computer. He said, “I’m not necessarily contributing all of that time, but I am reading the feed and taking note of what is out there.” Though Twitter usage on the part of a beat writer covering a particular team or sport certainly varies according to what time of year it is, Jones, for example, provided an account of a typical Wednesday during the NFL regular season, which is one of her busiest days:

Let’s say it’s a Wednesday, which is the big press conference day. So we get out to the facility in the morning, and we have conference calls with the coach and a player from the opposing team for that week. Usually after that, I’ll send out a couple of highlights on Twitter: “Oakland coach Tom Cable says Sebastian Janikowski won’t kick this week,” or whatever, just a couple of newsworthy nuggets. Then we’ll have the press conferences with the Broncos head coach and quarterback, and then we’ll have a locker room session. So during the press conferences, I basically sit there with my laptop on my lap or on my desk and live-tweet it. There are people asking questions, and [former coach] Josh [McDaniels] is answering questions. A lot of the stuff would be newsworthy-type stuff: injury updates, somebody’s not going to start, somebody’s going to start, somebody’s playing, not playing, basically press conference highlights. I do the same thing with the

quarterback. If there’s anything in the locker room, I might tweet a highlight or two from there: “Champ Bailey said that Vincent Jackson is the best receiver in the league today,” or something like that. Then we get to watch the first 15 minutes of practices, which is basically enough time to take roll. If somebody’s there or not there, that’s usually how you can tell if they’re going to play or not play. You get to see enough at the beginning of practice that you can tell sometimes if they’ve made any depth-chart switches… So those are the kinds of things you race back out—since we’re not allowed to tweet from the practice field—and send from your phone or go back to the media room and post it. It’s definitely a race with the other beat writers, because getting retweeted is kind of a big deal. If I post that Kyle Orton is throwing passes while Tim Tebow is getting all the first- team reps, and I’m the first one to get it, and [ESPN’s] Adam Schefter, or Pro Football Talk, or one of the major, major sites sees it and retweets it, that’s a big deal. That’s a lot of people who are crediting me for whatever the news might be. It’s a constant stream, and I guess the other side of it would be the interaction with readers. The Broncos fans, in particular, will ask questions, and I answer questions. During the season, we do that a lot. It’s all about engaging with the readers in a way that was unheard of before now.

Jones’ account of her day illustrates how central Twitter is not only to her personal journalistic routine, but also to the routines of her colleagues on the Broncos beat. When news happens, Twitter is the first place it is reported. She said that for her piece for Harvard’s Nieman Reports

she counted around 120 tweets that she had produced on a single game day (Jones, 2010). Boyer related a similar routine, but on a smaller scale: “I would say up to a dozen to 20 tweets during the course of a game, including the final score.” Buker echoed Jones’ notion of a “constant stream,” or an ongoing discussion between, in his case, Oregon State fans, football players,

basketball players, athletic department officials and others in which he participates, and

sometimes initiates, each day. Elliott noted that one night she was not attending a hockey game in either Los Angeles or Anaheim, so she decided to live-tweet while she watched some out-of- town games. She soon got a direct message to her account that read: “I love the play-by-play. Wish I could watch. I’m in Bali, Indonesia.” Davidoff said he tweets links to his blog posts two or three times a day, in addition to breaking news, random thoughts, and a “shtick” he does during the MLB regular-season which involves making a new prediction of the final records for the Mets and Yankees each day. Taken together, the journalists’ comments give the impression that such constant and far-reaching dialogue via Twitter seems, at the same time, to be both overwhelming and satisfying.