Twitter should not tell the story, not be the story

After a few weeks of well earned rest, CBM has returned from its holidays and is ready for the season to begin again. Ok so we’re still a few weeks away from the big kick off, but the Scottish league started this weekend, and that’s enough for me to consider that football is once again back in our lives.

Twitter now common for players

Like some of you, I’ve been able to follow the fortunes of the Premier League’s stars on their expensive holidays via Twitter. Wayne Rooney seemed to travel half-way around the world to sing in a karaoke bar, Rio Ferdinand made his way to Asia - still promoting his many business interests of course - and Michael Owen fretted about the performances of his beloved racehorses. It’s an example of how Twitter is becoming an ever-more essential tool for being a football fan.

The use of Twitter by footballers has not been without controversy, with players such as Ryan Babel and Carlton Cole falling foul of the FA by posting messages deemed inappropriate by the powers that be. Some fans unfortunately also feel that following a footballer gives them the right to send as much abuse as is possible in 140 characters. And whilst I’m sure many players are tempted to send their own volley of bile back, the best approach seems to be from the likes of Rooney, who merely retweets the most vicious of messages as a way of highlighting the nonsense he has to put up with.

In many ways though, Twitter has become the antidote to the theory that modern footballers have lost touch with the fans; that there are no longer opportunities for supporter and star striker to engage in the way they might have done in days gone by. Thanks to Twitter, fans can now find out their heroes’ views on the weekend’s events, ask them questions - sometimes even getting answers - and find out more about the inner-workings of football clubs with updates on pre-season schedules and pre-match routines.

Far from replacing the face-to-face contact that a fan might have had with players in the 50s and 60s - when it’s romantically claimed you could regularly spot your team’s captain sipping a pint in your local - I believe Twitter has actually brought fans closer to players than they have ever been.

At what many might initially perceive to be uninteresting commentary on people’s lives, even the most mundane of tweets from footballers can offer interesting insights into the lives of the modern player. Take Michael Owen for example; hardly the sport’s most charismatic figure and his Twitter account would struggle to excite even the most easily pleased Manchester United supporter, but his tweets do have an everyman appeal that I find interesting. And ultimately, it’s interesting because despite the huge riches he’s acquired over the years, his life is just as dull as yours and mine.

I’ve read tweets from him about ordering a take-away curry to watch Match of the Day with his wife, heading to the pub on a Sunday afternoon for lunch and finding somewhere with the football on whilst out for a family dinner. Yes, it’s true that none of this information improves our lives in any way, but the fact that all of the above are the very same activities that much of the working population do on a regular basis, helps to show that footballers are not the alien species that we often assume they are.

Joey Barton is another case in point. Known for many years as one of football’s more unsavoury characters, it would be easy to assume that his tweets would offer nothing but an insight into a violent moron’s mindset. Yet in actual fact, Barton often uses Twitter to spark debate on wide ranging subjects from politics to football. He comes across as educated, eloquent and just the right side of opinionated to be interesting and not arrogant. Oh, and he’s a big fan of The Smiths too, which is alright by me.

Naturally with so many footballers now using the site, journalists scrutinise their messages to try and find any information that might help fill up their word count in the desperate days between one season ending and a new one beginning. And this is where my issue with the use of Twitter lies.

In my view, the media is there to tell the stories that the man on the street would otherwise not know. You read the newspaper because journalists investigate, interview and analyse in order to produce content that you in no way could find out yourself. That’s why we read the football gossip pages, because we are eager to find out where certain players might be heading, but have no way of sourcing the information. It’s why we read interviews with the likes of Fernando Torres and John Terry, because you or I will never get the chance to speak to the game’s biggest stars for 30 minutes.

However, over the past year the media - including the sports correspondents - have taken to writing their copy based solely on people’s tweets. So a story on a Premier League player committing to a football club may no longer be obtained as a result of the journalist developing a professional relationship with the player and becoming a trusted confidant; it can now be done merely by looking at a player’s Twitter account - just like you, me or anyone else in the world could do.

Now of course with sponsors wanting their pound of flesh from stars and making media access to them more difficult, journalists have to find other ways to reach the players. And Twitter becoming part of an ever-growing 24 hour news industry also means ‘breaking’ stories becomes more of a challenge than ever before. However, I struggle to see how printing a player’s tweet is news: it isn’t new information, provides no analysis of a situation and merely reproduces words the majority of fans will already have read and since forgotten.

At a time when the media is struggling to work out how to get the most out of print in a digital age, this approach strikes me as lazy, and will do nothing to enhance the fortunes of the media at a time when its stock could hardly be lower. We’ve known for a long time that people get their news from a variety of sources rather than their newspaper, so now is the time for the media to focus on how their content can excite, interest and educate the reader. Reprinting a two day old tweet is certainly not the way forward.