Crowdsourcing is an important development of digital journalism. Friday Night Tweets is a way to bring the crowds that gather in bleachers during football season (or any sports season) into sports coverage.
I started my journalism career covering high school sports for a Monday-Friday evening newspaper. That meant games were nearly three days old by the time I wrote about them. If you cared about the game and weren’t there, you certainly heard the score on the radio Friday or Saturday or on the grapevine over the weekend or at school Monday before reading my story. I could have and should have made those stories more engaging and timely by bringing the crowd into them more. But mostly I just reported the old news.
Now journalists can cover games as they happen with liveblogs and livestreaming. Even if you’re not at a game, you can provide live coverage by encouraging and curating social media coverage by students and parents attending the games.
My boss in that first sportswriting job, Chuck Offenburger, recently suggested to our hometown audience that every school activity (including music, speech and other competitive activities, as well as sports) have a designated tweeter to provide live results of its games through social media. I heartily agree. And I’ll add the suggestion that every local sports staff should curate those results into a Friday night live prep sports feed. (Actually, you might want to make it any night that any team plays and Saturday during the day, when a lot of wrestling meets, band contests and the like happen, but Friday nights would be the peak.) I’m sharing this suggestion directly with sports editors throughout the Journal Register Co.
Ideally, this would be a cooperative venture between local news organizations and student newspapers or high school journalism programs. But it also could be a duty of the student managers who keep statistics for games. Or booster clubs or volunteer parents could undertake the duties.
I should add here that Friday Night Tweets is not original with me. I didn’t steal it, but an hour or so after I wrote this headline, and before I posted the blog, I wondered if I was the first to think of it. Sure enough, the Quad City Times was liveblogging Friday Night Tweets last Friday, though it appears to be primarily aggregating tweets from sportswriters, not contributors recruited from the schools. I’ve asked sports editor Don Doxsie how that went and whether he has any tips to share. I’ll update with his response if I hear from him. Update: See Doxsie’s response in the comments below.
Update: Kelly Metz of the Morning Journal in Lorain, Ohio, tells me that our JRC sports colleagues there did a similar thing last week, with sportswriters tweeting from the football games they were covering.
Update #2: Thanks to Robert LaHue of the Appeal-Democrat in Marysville, Calif., who noted that is staff is collaborating with other local media in a Friday night live-tweeting effort along the lines I’ve described.
Update #3. Thanks to JRC colleague Jason Schmidt, MIPrepZone editor for the Oakland Press, for noting that they did a video broadcast of a game last Friday and are planning live audio (and video playback minutes after the game tonight).
The updates keep coming: Brian Norton of my old newsroom, the Omaha World-Herald, tweets that they are having some success with a #nebpreps hashtag, fed into CoverItLive and moderated by Graham Archer. It does include fan tweets, but Brian says they would like more.
Still another update: Nathan Byrne of KQTV in St. Joseph, Mo., tweets that his station is doing Friday Night Tweets. I asked him to elaborate, and he sent an email that I’ve added in the comments below.
And another update from Sean Barker, also in the comments.
At the minimum, you want to encourage people to tweet final scores using your hashtag, something like #freemanscores if you’re the Daily Freeman in Kingston, N.Y. But you would encourage participants to tweet the score at each quarter (or inning or other period) and each time a team scores (perhaps not in basketball or volleyball, but maybe more often than quarterly). Ideally, tweeters would provide some color commentary, sharing opinions on officiating calls and describing outstanding plays.
People wouldn’t have to use Twitter to follow the progress. A news organization would feed the hashtag and/or designated tweeters into a CoverItLive event or Twitter widget on the news website, so anyone could follow online. If a fan’s team is contending for the conference championship, you could watch (and join the tweeting) from your home bleachers and keep tabs on you cellphone on how your rivals are doing in their games.
Each news organization would need to work out logistical details locally, but I suggest something like this:
Invite athletic directors (and activity directors, music directors, etc.) to share guidelines with interested students, coaches, teachers and fans. The AD’s would submit the names and usernames of people who agree to tweet about the games. You would add them as approved tweeters to feed automatically into the CoverItLive event.
You could feed the hashtag in automatically and monitor what shows up or have an editor monitor the hashtag to add other tweets or others who appear to be tweeting responsibly. (You have to presume some high school students will clutter the hashtag with crude or mischievous tweets.) You’ll want to monitor the liveblog anyway to approve comments from the public that don’t come through Twitter and delete any inappropriate comments (that will happen with students and avid fans contributing).
You won’t be staffing every game in your coverage area, but make sure your sportswriters provide strong and steady coverage by Twitter, especially if they are not liveblogging (which I encourage). What they can do will vary depending on whether they have to keep their own stats or whether the schools provide them, and whether they are in a pressbox, stands or on the sidelines. At the least, sportswriters should tweet quarter scores and every time a team scores, (or occasional summaries, lead changes and such in basketball or the score at each serve change in volleyball). Ideally, a few tweets about big plays or trends in the game would also be good.
With the base of your staff tweets and a few tweeters generated from promotion to athletic directors, you can develop a strong live feed that will become a go-to place for your community for busy high-school sports nights. And every time a school or activity complains about not being included, you sent them a copy of the guidelines and encourage them to join the fun.
If you have honors such as Athlete of the Week or all-conference teams, encourage the tweeps to nominate stars for those honors.
Be sure to promote your Friday Night Tweets in the print product, on your website, Twitter account(s) and Facebook. You also should offer a text-message service for high-school scores. Maybe you could create a widget (perhaps with a sponsorship) that local sports blogs or high school websites could post, linking to the liveblog.
Here’s a draft of some guidelines you might offer for approved tweeters from the schools:
- Tweet the final score and scores at the end of each period.
- Tweet each score (except in basketball or other sports with lots of scores; in those cases, tweet highlights, lead changes, streaks and the like).
- Get a program, if one is available, so you can be sure to spell names correctly. If not, try to get a roster from each team in advance of the game.
- Use the hashtag. And if you’re covering something other than the dominant sport of the season (football, in fall), use a secondary hashtag identifying the sport, such as #volleyball or #xcountry.
- Before you hit “tweet,” read over the tweet and doublecheck the spelling and score.
- Use the team names frequently, if not in every tweet. School and mascot names.
- Before the game starts, tweet what you’re doing (warning people who follow you and don’t care about the game that you’re going to be tweeting a lot).
- If a performer really stands out to you, tweet a nomination for Athlete of the Week.
- If you’re a fan, cheering for your team is welcome, as is some good-natured trash talk about the opposing team in general. Mean-spirited trash talk or personal attacks on players or coaches will not be allowed in the liveblog. Those tweets will be deleted, the offender will be warned and banned from the liveblog if the offense is repeated.
What are some other guidelines a news organization should provide to designated tweeters? Do you have some tips (or experience) recruiting people to tweet about high school activities? Do you know of others already doing Friday Night Tweets or something like it?
Thanks to Ron Rosner, Freeman sports editor, who helped me add some form to this general idea in a brainstorming discussion in my visit to Kingston last week.
Acknowledgement added after the original post: This idea would have been more timely if I had proposed it in July, giving sports staffs more time to implement it. But I still think you can move pretty quickly and provide Friday Night Tweets engagement for most of the football season (and the seasons beyond).
Thanks to Quad City Times Sports Editor Don Doxsie for sending this response by email:
We did this all of last season and generally got 500-600 viewers on most Friday nights. For the one we did on the opening night last Friday, we had more than 1,000 so I think it’s catching on. (We did one for opening night of the Iowa high school playoffs lats season and I think that one was over 2,000.) We get updates from all of our reporters in the field but also pick up updates of other games from other newspapers and radio stations. One thing you will need is someone back at the office monitoring the whole thing, approving comments from readers, answering questions, etc. I did that myself last Friday and I was constantly busy for a couple of hours. If your readers are like ours, you will have a few troublemakers who will try to slip in derogatory comments about other schools. We obviously do not usually approve those comments. Readers also will go off on tangents and engage in discussions that have nothing to do with the games at hand. We generally let those discussions go unless they get carried away.
I would recommend you take advantage of some of the special features Coveritlive has. We usually will have a Scoreboard with updates on the biggest games, which reduces (but doesn’t completely eliminate) questions from readers about what the score of such-and-such a game is. If things get slow, we sometimes also will throw out a poll question to readers.
Good luck with it. Hopefully, your live blog will grow in popularity the way ours has. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.
Don Doxsie
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Another great email response, this one from Nathan Byrne of KQTV in St. Joseph, Mo.:
We don’t have what I’d consider a lot of Twitter users in our viewing area, but we do see noticeable increases in followers when we narrow-focus Twitter use for things like high school football.
Our station’s main account (@kq2) has about 1,400 followers. We slowly rolled out the @football2night account about a week before the season started, simply sharing our nightly preseason previews leading up to week one.
Our main competitor, the local newspaper, had attempted to use a hashtag for a preseason game — our “City Jamboree.” They went with #cityjambo, and no one used it. Too hard to remember.
The following week (last Friday; week one), they used CoverItLive and encouraged readers/followers to use the hashtag, #npfb (News-Press Football). I thought this one was harder to remember than #cityjambo, but a couple of people started using it more toward the end of the night. The paper also fed #mopreps–a hashtag used across Missouri–into their liveblog. While this added content, it took the focus away from local, which didn’t make much sense to me.
I haven’t been a fan of liveblogging local sports in our market, because–simply–not enough of the viewer/reader base is comfortable using the technology. Plus, it seems that high school football fans will spend their evening at one game, relying on their phones for scores from others and then they go home. But they aren’t in front of traditional computers while the games are live. And in my experience, liveblog software like CoverItLive just doesn’t display or function as well on a phone.
Hashtags, on the other hand, I can get behind. But they have to be easy to remember and they have to make sense. For severe weather, we’ll go to #stjoestorm, and the amateur weather reports, pictures and videos come rolling in. We’ll RT those live, then use something like Storify to aggregate after the event.
We’re applying those same basic principles that have worked for news and weather to sports, and having success with high school football. We took the @football2night account from 30 followers to 130 on game night. This happened with no on-air promotion, nothing on our website, nothing on the app. We mentioned it once on Facebook (around 6,000 likes) Friday afternoon, then pushed it right before game time on our station’s main Twitter account. It grew because people knew we had the scores.
We had some of the scores because we were at the games, sure. But our followers were contributing scores, updates and photos. We even RTed the competition a few times. I wanted this account to become *the* source for scores and updates. Then, we’d ideally drive them to watch our highlights show when they came home from the games.
For week two, I wasn’t planning on using a hashtag. But after reading your article and having our discussion on Twitter, I’ve decided to try using our name as a hashtag (#football2night). Since hashtag adoption has been something of an issue in this market, sports-wise, I’m not going to press too hard to get people to use it. I’m just going to add it to our original updates and to RTs and see how well it catches on.
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Some more advice by email, from my Journal Register colleague Sean Barker, sports editor of the New Haven Register:
Connecticut has a #CTFB hashtag set up that majority of papers and many fans use. I think this is the third year of the hashtag. It does mean we are sharing scores with other media outlets, but we also get their scores as well.
Two things to be aware of that we learned last year:
Make sure someone is keeping stats if you are not able to when live blogging. Not all coaches/scorekeepers, etc., keep live stats. Some work off film later that night or the next morning, which would have been fine for your first job.
Make sure the school does not have a block on Twitter. This should be easier this year with the netbooks distributed, but we had more than one occassion last year where the high school had blocks on social media sites on grounds through their wireless networks.
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Really awesome article.
We’re putting out an app to make covering games live entirely through Twitter dead simple. We’re talking less than 3 seconds per play with a custom hash tag.
It’s called Plays, and it hasn’t officially launched on the Apple app store yet (requires an iPad/iPhone/iPod). You can get access with this link: http://t.co/EKM9TvP
We’ve gotten lots of interest from the NFL on the app and have even signed up some community newspapers in Texas for this Fall sports season.
To learn more, visit: http://yoursports.com/plays
Cheers,
Chris McCoy, Founder
YourSports
chrism@yoursports.com
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Hey Steve,
Just wanted to throw out a project we’re working on for covering just this sort of thing. It’s in its infancy, but feel free to check it out and see what you think!
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