“Tweet this.”
That’s what Tony Grossi should have said long ago when his bosses at the Plain Dealer ordered the sports guys to start sharing their every waking thought with the general public.
By tweeting ’round the clock, the theory goes, newspaper reporters not only reinforce their value to existing customers, but also turn noncustomers into paying customers, or at least website hits.
That is precisely the reason Grossi was whacking away on Twitter one weekday evening when he hit the wrong button and accidentally tweeted his disdain for Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner to all 15,000 of his followers, rather than the one person to whom he was intending to respond via Twitter’s “direct message” function.
As a result, Grossi was yanked off the Browns beat after nearly 20 years of solid reporting. He will be reassigned to another job in the PD’s sports department.
Grossi’s downfall came via a technology that didn’t even exist for the first 14 years he covered the Browns.
Newspapers, having drastically underestimated the growing power of the Internet in the mid-1990s (posting their product for free rather than charging a nickel or a dime per story), are determined to master every technology that comes down the pike. So now everyone is supposed to tweet.
The question we should be asking is: Why?
Why should a sportswriter who is covering, say, a basketball game, send out little comments about the game every five minutes? If the tweet recipients were that interested in the action, wouldn’t they be riveted to the game on radio or TV?
And if the sportswriter is tweeting every five minutes, isn’t his story going to suffer? To write a decent story, you need enough time to do two things: fully absorb the nuances of the event and turn those observations into a coherent, compelling piece of writing.
Even if a sportswriter has 50,000 followers, how does that translate into making his newspaper any money? If those followers don’t already know the guy, they’re not following his tweets. If they do already know the guy, they’re buying the paper or reading the stories online.
Grossi simply hit the wrong button in an endless sea of button-hitting. Little wonder. Sportswriting — never the cushy gig fans envision, given the fact you work nights and weekends and consistently fight impossible deadlines — has turned into a 24-hour job.
Beat writers are expected to monitor what everyone else is writing, broadcasting, tweeting and blogging, and constantly update their own stories while tweeting and blogging themselves.
Would I have reassigned Grossi? Tough call. He has covered the Browns well for two decades. Sacking him because of one careless mistake seems incredibly harsh.
On the other hand, it’s tough to disagree with Plain Dealer Managing Editor Thom Fladung (a former boss of mine) when he says readers’ perceptions of Grossi have forever changed.
As Fladung told WKYC (Channel 3)’s Jim Donovan, whenever Grossi would write something flattering about the Browns, many readers would think he was just trying to atone for the insult. Whenever he’d write something negative, many readers would figure he was just doing it because he hates Lerner, a man he identified as “a pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”
(The fact it’s pretty much impossible for a billionaire to be “irrelevant” is beside the point.)
Things would be different if Grossi were a columnist, a Terry Pluto or a Marla Ridenour, who gets paid to offer personal opinion. In that case, the errant tweet would have been perceived merely as a tasteless cheap shot, not a career-altering disaster.
Grossi is not alone in his lightning-fast journalist misstep. Over the weekend, Adam Jacobi, a blogger for the CBS website, was fired for having reported that Joe Paterno had died before he was actually dead.
Jacobi wanted to be first. Mission accomplished.
In the old days, a filter would have existed between Jacobi’s fingers and the enormous universe of CBS. Today, because speed has become everything, there isn’t one.
Same with Twitter.
At some newspapers, reporters and columnists are essentially ordered to tweet. At others, they are strongly encouraged to tweet. I work for one of the latter, which is why I have remained tweetless.
Granted, it makes perfect sense for a beat writer to open a Twitter account to see what athletes, owners and others are tweeting. But even then, you’re never certain what you’re getting. National TV analyst and former Cavs coach Mike Fratello told Cleveland radio station WKRK (92.3-FM) last week that his tweeting is actually done by his daughter — who also composes the tweets that supposedly come directly from the big thumbs of Charles Barkley.
If you’re not familiar with Twitter, the maximum number of characters you can send in one message is 140. My previous paragraph contains 448.
Fast and shallow. The new norm.
Full speed ahead.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com.
