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. (more…)
The Buttry Diary 