Texting and Tweeting: How Social Media has changed

Journalism news gathering

By Jed Novick and Rob Steen

University of Brighton

Once upon a time it was all so simple. Journalist finds

out news and writes it up. Reader buys newspaper and

finds out news. It’s a very straightforward recipe.

Everyone knows their place. Everyone does their bit.

Everyone gets what they want. But nothing stands still

and after centuries of monopoly, newspapers find

themselves under threat as never before. No one can say

it hasn’t been coming.

First radio and then television stole the thunder and

muted the thunderers of the written press. By the 1980s,

the sale of live broadcast rights together with the

emergence of television “pages” such as Ceefax and

Teletext had ensured that newspaper journalists were

seldom first to break the news, especially when it came

to sport. The final nail in the ink-and-paper coffin, it

seemed, was the advent of the world wide web, a medium

unencumbered by time zones, geographical borders,

conventional deadlines and space, less concerned with

exclusive material than information, and almost instantly

updateable. Then, just when we imagined that the world

couldn’t possibly whirr any faster, along bounced social

media and, in particular, the two Ts: Texting and

Tweeting. This chapter addresses these profoundly 21st

Century phenomena.

Legal and media history was made in May 2012 when the

cricketer Chris Cairns won £90,000 in damages for a tweet

made on 10 January 2010 by Lalit Modi, then commissioner

and cheerleader-in-chief for the Indian Premier League,

accusing Cairns of match-fixing. It was the sporting

equivalent of removing the pin from a grenade, timed for

maximum impact: Cairns had just been omitted from the

list of candidates for the IPL auction. The offending

message read: “Chris Cairns removed from the IPL auction

list due to his past record in match fixing. This was

done by the Governing Council today.”1 As a case study,

this landmark ruling reflects cricket’s surging profile

in the first decade of the century and its concurrent

troubles with corruption, as well as the astonishingly

rapid rise of social media.

Cairns, a belligerent, multi-talented New Zealander who

had captained his country, was hired to lead Chandigarh

Lions in the Indian Cricket League, the first Twenty20

league outside England and soon to be terminated with

extreme prejudice by Modi and the IPL. The official line

was that Cairns had breached the terms of his contract,

having failed to disclose an ankle injury. Modi alleged

that Cairns had not only sought to fix matches, but

involved teammates in the scam. Cairns sued Modi, a

shrewd businessman and arch-self-publicist prone to

skating on very thin ice and causing offence with off-

the-cuff remarks.

The Cairns-Modi libel trial lasted nine days at London’s

High Court, during which three of Cairns’ teammates

testified that he had sought to bribe them. To be thus

accused, he insisted, was “one of if not the most serious

and damaging of all allegations that could possibly be

levelled against a professional sportsman. Uncorrected it

will destroy all that I have achieved over a successful

20-year sporting career.” He also claimed that his media

work had “dried up” since Modi's tweet and he had not

played professional cricket since.

Justice Bean ruled in Cairns’s favour and awarded

£400,000 in interim costs in addition to the £90,000

damages. Modi, he pronounced, had “singularly failed” to

provide any reliable evidence that Cairns was involved in

match-fixing or spot-fixing, or even strong grounds for

suspicion of cheating. “It is obvious,” he elaborated,

“that an allegation that a professional cricketer is a

match-fixer goes to the core attributes of his

personality and, if true, entirely destroys his

reputation for integrity. The allegation is not as

serious as one of involvement in terrorism or sexual

offences. But it is otherwise as serious an allegation as

anyone could make against a professional sportsman.”2 At

the time of writing, Modi, was pursuing an appeal.

What’s interesting is not so much what Modi said. It’s

how he said it. While it’s possible to say that Modi

could have made his remarks at any time through any media

– he was, after all a Big Fish who could command an

audience – the story illustrates two things. First, the

individual can now publish anything without any checks or

balances. Had Modi expressed his opinion through, for

example, a newspaper article, the journalist would have

checked. The sub-editor, the section editor, the paper’s

lawyer… It would never have got through. Second – and

let’s be charitable here – he didn’t check himself. It

could have been as simple as 1) think, 2) write, 3) send.

And then, in a flash, the Tweet had gone round the world.

No going back. Never before has an individual had this

power.

“We came across the word “twitter”, and it was just perfect. The definition was

“a short burst of inconsequential information”, and “chirps from birds”. And

that's exactly what the product was.”

Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter3

Social media. Citizen journalism. These ideas help both

the journalist and the wider public by widening the area

that journalists can cover. We often bemoan cutbacks and

tightening of belts with the attendant complaint that

investigative journalism isn’t what it was. Newspapers,

it is rightly but sadly pointed out, simply don’t have

the resources to allow journalists investigate a story

for months on end.

While the internet allows us to access the world without

ever having to leave the comfort of our desks, it has

also controlled the way that information is disseminated.

For example, through their websites, sports clubs and

governing bodies have, with some success, attempted to

control information. This has helped journalists on one

level, but made them content with reporting bland news

instead of digging for more searching insights. At the

same time, the myriad websites and blogs seldom offered

exclusive information worthy of being re-tweeted - as the

saying now goes - by newspapers. It has taken social

media, which has given both players and fans a voice

they'd never had before, to really shake things up.

Lack of resources led to a kind of groupthink. Maybe it’s

no surprise that the collective noun for the press is

pack. We talk of the press pack in the way we’d talk

about a gang or a group. As Zeynep Tufekci has said:

“Journalists won’t admit this often, but they tend to be

pack animals. Staying in the same hotel. Hanging out in

the same bar. Attending the same press conference. Going

to the same event. Taking the same picture from near-

identical angle. Packs often made their decisions

collectively as well.”4

Journalists confer after a press conference. Critics will

be given the same press information at a film screening;

cricket reporters receive the same service before a match

or tournament. The same press release will be sent out to

all the journalists working in the same field (so long as

the PR company has done its homework). And time is tight.

And money is tight. And so, as Zeynep says, “Packs often

made their decisions collectively as well.”5 Consciously

or subconsciously.

While all that’s been said - the tightening of belts, the

pack mentality and the reliance on spoon-fed information

which has led to the rise of ‘churnalism’ (regurgitated

press releases) increasingly it seems that Twitter is now

where stories break and where we learn the news.

Social media has allowed a freedom of thought and freedom1NOTES

? Royal Courts of Justice, 26 March 2012, http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/cairns-v-modi-judgment.pdf2 “Setback for Lalit Modi, loses libel case against Chris Cairns”, Times of India, 26 March 2012, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/top-stories/Setback-for-Lalit-Modi-loses-libel-case-against-Chris-Cairns/articleshow/12414248.cms3 “Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site’s founding document”, 18 February 2009 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html4 Zeynep, Tufekci, “Journalism, Social Media and Packs & Cascades: Lessons from an Error”, http://technosociology.org/?p=6385 Ibid

of expression in an unprecedented way, creating a world

where we are all journalists, where journalism fits more

into George Orwell’s dictum – “Journalism is printing

what someone else does not want printed: everything else

is public relations”6 – and less into Rupert Murdoch’s.

Well, that’s the idea.

*************

Like all good ideas, social media has been around for a

while – albeit in different forms with different names.

Sniffin Glue, the first punk fanzine, was published in July

1976 by Mark Perry after he had seen a gig in London

headlined by The Ramones, the prototype American three-

chord thrashers. In terms of the punk movement, it was

perfect. It captured the moment and was more concerned

with energy and spirit than expertise.

“The whole of that first issue was what I could do at that time with what I had

in my bedroom. I had a children's typewriter plus a felt-tip pen. I just thought

it would be a one-off. I knew when I took it to the shop there was a good

chance they'd laugh at me, but instead they said, “How many have you got?” I

think my girlfriend had done 20 on the photocopier at her work and they

bought the lot off me.”7

Mark Perry, Q Magazine April 2002

6 Great Quotes http://www.doublethinknot.com/great-quotes/7 Punk Fanzines http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/counterculture/doityourself/punkfanzines/punkfanzines.html

Forget the technology and means of delivery, that Perry

used a photocopier and a stapler to produce it and that

the distribution network comprised Perry and his

girlfriend. It was social media in action. It was

reporting from the action, as it happened, by someone who

wasn’t a “journalist” in the traditional sense of the

word. Perry was simply a fan with a view. He had no

expertise. No one gave him permission to express himself.

No one commissioned him, edited him or published him. He

simply grabbed the means of communication and

communicated.

Twitter is but the latest next stage and is, in many

ways, the embodiment of punk journalism. In a sense, this

isn’t new and it isn’t anything to do with Twitter.

Newspapers have been on this continuum for some time.

While America had embraced the idea of sports news on the

radio for quite some time, in Britain things were a

little slower, and despite niche programming such as

midweek football and boxing on Radio 2, the game-changer

did not come until March 1994. Before that, if you wanted

a report of last night’s match you had to buy the next

day’s newspaper (leaving aside evening papers and

“Pinks”, both fast-dying services). The launch of Radio 5

Live changed all that for British sports lovers.

Suddenly, by the time the next day’s newspaper came out

the sports fan could have already heard the match report

and seemingly endless debate.

“Print sports journalism adapts and changes... to the arrival and

consolidation of each new wave of media development and its wider social

impact.”8

Raymond Boyle, Sports Journalism: context and issues

Twitter’s impact on journalism and the way journalists

work was, and remains, difficult to quantify. On the one

hand, their job in the digital era, further aided by the

accessibility via the Internet of a vast web of news

sources as well the proliferation of club websites (often

if not always the first for news), was distinctly easier,

in terms of logistics if not time. The perceived need –

perceived by editors, that is - to blog, tweet, update

one’s website regularly and keep permanently abreast of

breaking news elsewhere may have meant that the lot of

the sportswriter – characterised many years ago, and many

times, as a fan with a typewriter - was now a far cry

from what it was when we entered the trade in the mid-

1980s. Yet it was also a much more comfortable existence.

Indeed, rather than going to matches or training grounds

and actually watching or meeting their subjects, it was

now eminently feasible to be an efficient and effective

reporter without leaving the office, or even home.

The growth of social media has taken journalism outside

the “pack” and has meant that the number of voices being 8 Boyle, Raymond (2006), Sports Journalism: context and issues. London: Sage.

heard has exploded, as has the number of different

viewpoints expressed. Allowing more voices into the mix,

it gives a voice to the people on the ground, local

people. More often than not, this is a good thing. “One

of the biggest weaknesses in foreign-news journalism,”

declared Zeynep, “is that journalists are not part of

the story they are writing and are, almost by definition,

lacking in understanding of the context.”9 The other side

is that a non-attached traditional journalist who is not

part of the story they are writing is in a position to

better see the story from different – non-partisan –

points of view. Because of that non-partisan view they

are more likely to verify their facts and sources. In

other words, proper journalism.

The consequences for veracity, insight and credibility,

however, could be grave, as was highlighted in January

2011 by the anonymous author of They All Count, “nearly a

football blog” and a site we last encountered more than

18 months later, in September 2012, by when it was

dominated by photos of famous players’ wives and partners

in various states of undress. This should not completely

erode one’s faith in the judgement of the author.

Jack Wilshere, Arsenal’s promising young midfielder, the

author lamented, had become a Twitter addict. “Bring

Becks to Arsenal” exhorted one such missive. “What a 9 Zeynep, Tufekci, “Journalism, Social Media and Packs & Cascades: Lessons from an Error”, http://technosociology.org/?p=638

great example he would be for all of us! His professional

attitude, ability and experience! love 2 work with him!”10

On those 140 characters alone were based scores of

headlines, such as the Daily Mail’s classic attempt to turn

a pint into a quart: “Sign up Becks, Arsene! Arsenal

youngster Wilshere urges Wenger to snap up former

Manchester United star”. They All Count was not amused.

“Is this what sports journalism has come to?” our blogger

wondered under the headline “How Twitter is destroying

football journalism”. “Journalists sitting patiently by

their twitter feeds, just in case any footballers happen

to divulge 140 characters worth of ‘news’ which can be

beefed up into an article, just to keep their site’s

constant flow of sub-standard and mind-numbing content

rolling along.”11 (That said, it was a measure of what you

could get away with in the wild west web that those same

sentiments reappeared, word-for-word, on the same site on

31 January 2012.) 12

10 “Sign up Becks, Arsene! Arsenal youngster Wilshere urges Wenger to snap up former Manchester United star”, Daily Mail, 4 January 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1344037/Arsenal-boss-Arsene-Wenger-urged-sign-David-Beckham-Jack-Wilshere.html11 “How Twitter is destroying football journalism”, theyallcount.com, 6 January 2011, http://www.theyallcount.com/2011/01/how-english-football-press-got-lazy-and.html12 “How Twitter is destroying football journalism”, theyallcount.com, 31 January 2012, http://www.theyallcount.com/search/label/Jack%20Wilshere

This has caused a number of prickly problems for working

journalists. Stories are what journalists live and die

by. We spend our time chasing stories, nurturing

contacts, feeding the ground. But if the stories are out

there on Twitter for anyone to see, where does that leave

the journalist? Welcome to the world according to Simon

Kelner, the former editor of The Independent who re-branded

the title as a “viewspaper”. Similarly, if a journalist

has a story and wants, for whatever reason, to hang on to

it, they risk losing it. Chances are someone will Tweet

it and then… the story is in the public domain and it’s

gone. Similarly, there’s the question of the old rules.

The Saturday football press conference protocol whereby

broadcast journalists go first, followed by the Sundays

and the dailies… can that still work?

Increasingly, not only does Twitter break the news, what

appears on Twitter is the news. Twitter has become both

the forum for debate and the source. The media –

especially the tabloid media - love conflict so they will

always report arguments on Twitter. Players know that if

they say something on Twitter it will be published in the

papers. In November 2011, Wayne Rooney took to Twitter to

admonish his then teammate Ravel Morrison. It was a

typical storm-in-a-teacup story. Player gets substituted,

has a moan, nothing happens. But Morrison had a moan on

Twitter (“I can not wait till the end of the season”) and

Rooney Tweeted back (“might come sooner than u

think!!!”).13 They played for the same team. They probably

saw each other every day. If Rooney wanted to tell

Morrison anything, he could probably simply have leant

across in whatever passes for a players’ canteen in the

multi-million pound 21st century. But he didn’t. He put it

in the public sphere.

Newspapers had to adapt. They had to interpret the story,

comment on it, contextualize it. In the same way that the

Monday report had to differ from the Sunday report, so

this had to become the norm. Analysis, comment,

reflection, reaction, consequences… these were what was

now required. Not just reporting the news, but making

sense of it.14 In a world where in the public eye

journalists occupy the same moral ground as politicians

and estate agents, reporters and feature writers (as well

as the omnipresent columnists) found themselves

positioned, ludicrously to some, as the voice of reason.

The post-internet world is a place where anyone can say

anything, where anyone can ‘break’ a story, report the

news and disseminate information, but only the trained

13 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/8871180/Wayne-Rooneys-Twitter-warning-to-Manchester-United-rising-star-Ravel-Morrison.html14 Price, John, Farrington, Neil, Hall, Lee, “Tweeting with the enemy? The impacts of new social media on sportsjournalism and the education of sports journalism students”, The Journal of the Association for Journalism Education, Vol 1, April 2012

and/or experienced journalist can do this with authority.

They alone have the power of the masthead and logo to

back up what they say and be aware of the consequences.

And at a time when the law as regards social media is

still in its infancy, not really knowing the boundaries,

this is increasingly important.

Taking information from non-journalists carries with it

certain risks, and the brave new world has claimed its

share of victims. The unslakeable thirst for instant

information - and for ever more quotes that could be

expanded into a story worthy of a provocative headline –

has led to a lazy, sometime desperate reliance on

unsubstantiated stories from dubious sources, on blogs

composed by non-journalists and on that mine of ill-

founded “information”.

Hoaxers have thrived. In the latter half of 2008, a

still-unidentified perpetrator created a fictional soccer

player named Masal Bugduv. Initially the subject of forum

posts by a mischievously creative blogger, Bugduv quickly

clambered up the feeding chain of European football media

by going from an insertion in a Wikipedia page to

comments in forums, blog posts and then – after

penetrating the mainstream media – to a football magazine

and finally to the ‘Football’s Top 50 Rising Stars’ list

of 2009 in The Times:

30. Masal Bugduv (Olimpia Balti)

Moldova's finest, the 16-year-old attacker has been strongly linked with a

move to Arsenal, work permit permitting. And he's been linked with plenty of

other top clubs as well.15

Not that The Times was alone in being duped. “The problem

was the identity of those who had been doing the

linking,” warranted Simon Burnton, who related the well-

spun yarn for readers of The Guardian. “Their story started

unravelling when the website theoffside.com alerted

readers to the list, and a blogger posted a message

suggesting that Bugduv didn't exist at all. On his own

blog the author, known as Makki, had already detailed, in

Russian, his failure to find any evidence of the player

on any Moldovan website, including that of his supposed

club. Searches in English had found stories apparently

written by the Associated Press (although not in a style

regular AP readers would recognise) linking the

‘midfielder’ with Arsenal and Zenit St Petersburg and

boasting about international appearances that simply

never happened.”

“I don’t think we need special laws for Twitter,” said

Mark Stephens, a social media lawyer at Finers Stephens

Innocent, “though we do need to take account of the way

15 Burnton, Simon, “Masul Bugduv: the 16-year-old Moldovanprodigy who doesn’t exist”, The Guardian, 15 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/jan/15/masal-bugduv-moldova-hoax-player

people are now getting their information and distributing

it.”16 The mere existence of social media lawyers

underlines how rapid the legal response has been, has had

to be.

A useful exercise is to try this test -

http://accidentaloutlaw.knowthenet.org.uk. It doesn’t

matter how long you’ve been a journalist, how long you’ve

been a writer, it will still trip you up.

*****************

The other problem with social media is possibly more…

problematic. Once upon a time, in the sepia-toned days

before George Best, footballers travelled to matches with

fans on the Number 27, sharing a pint and a fag. That

world has long since given way to one where agents,

personal managers, media trainers and the PR machine act

as a shield between players and fans. The players have

been smoothed and planed and smoothed again; they’ve been

media-trained to the point where there is nothing

individual left save a famous name and face. In the

process, their very individualism has been eroded; to

reach the public they still needed to go through a

journalist.

If only they could cut out the journalist. Why allow them

16 Rudd, Matt, “Tweet And Be Damned”, Sunday Times, 29 April2012 http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/focus/article1027239.ece

to editorialise and depict you in an unflattering light?

Why let them control how the public see you? Why risk

quotes being used out of context? If only you could

contact your fans directly, in the same way you could

when you were on the Number 27…

Twitter has allowed fans to get to know players in an

unprecedented way. It’s public intimate, a 21st century

version where contact is at once direct and personal and

at the same time distant and detached. Fans – consumers –

glean insights into the lives of the rich and famous and

can even obtain a direct answer to a direct question

through the simple expedient of the @ sign. But no one

actually meets, no one actually makes contact.

We can write to our favourite stars, they can write back

to us. We know what they had for dinner last night, what

they thought of the latest BBC drama. We get a glimpse

through the window into their lives, and it feels very

much like a direct communication, a communication that

hasn’t been put through the PR mincer, that hasn’t been

media-managed.

As Rob Steen wrote in the Cambridge Companion to Football

(2013)17: “Freed from the tyrannical leash of mundane

cliché and PR-speak, media-trained footballers use the

new medium to cut out the middleman, bypassing print and

17 Steen, Rob, “Sheepskin coats and nannygoats: The view from the press box”, in Steen, Rob, Novick, Jed and Richards, Huw (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Football, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. ??

television and communicating directly with anyone who has

the vaguest interest in their utterances. Journalists, as

a consequence, are on perpetual Twitter-watch. This cuts

both ways. While what ensues is largely a bonfire of the

inanities, exceptions, refreshingly, are on the rise.”

Take Javi Poves, a defender with Sporting Gijon in

Spain’s La Liga, who in tweeting his retirement described

his profession as “putrid” and “corrupt”. To continue in

this “circus” would offend his principles: “Footballers

are valued too much by our society compared to others who

should be the true heroes. The system is based on being

sheep and the best way to control them is to have a

population without culture.”18

Amid the riots that panicked England in the summer of

2011, to the delight of many and the fury of more, high-

profile players such as Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand

even dared to defy the chief law of the modern sporting

jungle, adopting a stance that could easily be construed

as political. Inevitably, clubs imposed fines. It was an

indication of the arrogance of those that run football,

not to say different priorities, that in September 2011,

Steve Elworthy, head of marketing at the England and

Wales Cricket Board, asserted that “the general

awareness” of the national team had never been higher,

attributing this in good measure to “digital media such 18 Marcotti, Gabriele, “Footballers and ideology combine for curious mix”, The Times, 15 August 2011, The Game supplement, p.15

as Facebook and Twitter allowing followers to get closer

to their heroes”.19

In a sense, Twitter has taken us back to those sepia-

tinged days. And the stars most prepared to play ball are

rewarded with a new status, the most blatant case in

point being the footballer Joey Barton.

In the land BT (Before Twitter), the man now known as

@Joey7Barton was a competent professional footballer who

probably made a very good living. But what he was really

known for was being a thug. In the land of dubious

morality and worse behaviour that is modern football,

Barton was out on his own. In December 2004, he stubbed

out a lit cigar in youth player Jamie Tandy’s eye. In May

2005 he broke a 35-year-old pedestrian's leg while

driving his car in Liverpool at 2am. In a pre-season tour

of Thailand, he assaulted a 15-year-old Everton fan. In

May 2007, he assaulted another teammate, Ousmane Dabo,

and carried on hitting him even after he fell

unconscious. By the time the court case came around,

Barton was already in prison, this time for attacking a

teenager in Liverpool city centre.

Yet for all that he is, at the same time, smart and

articulate and can, as Daniel Taylor has written in The

Guardian, be “charming and eloquent and can hold his own

19 Gillespie, James, and Wilde, Simon, “Cricket’s big hitters cross £1m boundary”, Sunday Times, 18 September 2011

in any company”.20 Twitter was made for Barton. Whatever

we may feel about him, he has used the medium better than

most, and has seemingly spent as much time Tweeting as he

has on the playing field. More, some might say, as it is

yet impossible to be sent off Twitter. Barton was,

seemingly, always on Twitter, quoting Smiths lyrics and

Nietzsche. It didn’t matter whether he extracted the

quotes from a quotes website; the very fact that he knew

what to look for was enough. (Similarly, when Damon

Albarn referenced Balzac in the Blur song “Country House”

it made it onto BBC2’s cultural review show). Besides, he

seemed so terribly reasonable. "Why do people always want

to solve any conflict with a fight?" he asked on Twitter.

"As a pacifist, I find it incredible."21 As a pacifist.

Barton loved Twitter. And Twitter loved Barton back.

But it wasn’t only Twitter that loved him. Everyone loved

him. He was invited into The Guardian and allowed into the

morning conference. He was invited to appear on Newsnight.

A book deal followed. It’s easy to see why. Twitter

showed Barton was smart: joshing with all the important

journalists, on first-name terms with everyone who could

write an opinion piece about him, playfully drawing

people in with small yet human devices such as suggesting

a song for the day. This last example might sound

20 Taylor, Daniel, “Joey Barton's latest act of violence proves he is no renaissance man”, The Guardian 19 May 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/may/19/joey-barton-qpr-violence-renaissance-man21 Ibid

ridiculously inconsequential, but in a world where ‘star’

footballers spoke like lobotomized robots and uttered

cartoon clichés about “the lads” and “the boss”, he was a

revelation.

“Everyone is so pathetically grateful to see a footballer

with a bit of personality,” wrote Taylor. “Barton was

embraced as some kind of class experiment and broadsheet

pin-up…Football is littered with people who are as

colourless as water. It is the way they are media

trained: to see little and say even less. So thank

heavens there will always be the odd rogue.”22

More pertinently, Barton knew that if he gave a

conventional interview, the questions would all be about

his violent conduct and stabs at anger management. The

headlines would be about Joey the thug and even a

sympathetic piece would be about Joey the thug trying not

to be a thug. Through Twitter, Barton could control what

was said about him and by extension control his image in

a way hitherto impossible.

The curtain came down on The Barton Show on 13 May 2012,

the last day of the 2012-13 season. Barton was sent off

for violent misconduct after elbowing Carlos Tevez in the

face. Immediately after, he kicked Sergio Aguero and

tried to head-butt Vincent Kompany. As he attempted to

take on Mario Balotelli (and what might Nietzsche have

made of that confrontation?) he was dragged off the pitch

22 Ibid

by Micah Richards. A reasonably good player, and

“charming and eloquent and can hold his own in any

company”, but he does have, how shall we say…issues.

Barton’s next stop was Marseilles. Would he have been

offered that loan deal had he not had such a high

profile, if he had just been Joey the thug? As he has

shown, Twitter has offered the opportunity to become more

than just a footballer, more than just a star. He can

become that most modern creation, a ‘personality’. As the

former News of the World editor Phil Hall has observed:

“Twitter turns you into a franchise. Instead of someone

like Rio Ferdinand being part of the Manchester United

franchise he is effectively creating his own.”23

It’s not just serial Tweeters such as Barton. Anyone and

everyone can do it. And for clubs that traditionally have

been run along disciplinarian, almost feudal, lines, this

can present a problem. If a player is, for whatever

reason, unhappy, the temptation now is to exercise that

twitchy Twitter finger. In February 2012, Aston Villa

winger Charles N’Zogbia was substituted in a match

against Newcastle at St James’ Park. Almost immediately

he Tweeted: “For the first time in my life I’m not happy

playing football.”24 It wasn’t the biggest story in the

world. No one’s going to hold the front page. But it was

23 Gibson, Owen, “There’s Trouble @ Twitter”, The Observer, 19 September 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/sep/12/twitter-owen-gibson

a problem for manager Alex McLeish. The Tweet was picked

up by the fans, the story went around, the level of

discontent at the club grew and… in the summer McLeish

was sacked. N’Zogbia’s Tweet didn’t sack McLeish. But it

contributed to the white noise of discontent – and that

was what put paid to McLeish.

Little wonder some clubs, such as Leeds United, have

banned their players from using Twitter; when Steve

Cotterill took over at Nottingham Forest he said he’d

impose fines at £1,000 a word if the Tweets slated the

club or the fans. “I have a rule that anyone using

Twitter or Facebook is not allowed to talk about the

football club, their team-mates or the supporters. If

someone wants to write a nice paragraph with 20 words in

it, then it’ll cost them about £20,000.”25

For the journalist, things arguably aren’t very

different. They too find themselves in a position where

they can have a direct line to the reader. The reader

ceases to be a reader of, for example, The Daily Planet who

likes a particular writer. Now the reader ‘follows’ the

writer who happens to be a writer for The Daily Planet. A 24 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2096843/charles-nzogbia-twitter-blast-aston-villa-substitution.html

25 http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/football/3877950/steve-cotterill-will-fine-nottingham-forest-players-for-using-twitter.html

subtle difference, but an important one. Twitter

effectively turns the writer – be it a journalist or an

‘ordinary person’– into the publisher. Whereas before

someone might go a buy a newspaper, now they can follow a

journalist. Thus the journalist becomes the product.

While journalists post links to their articles and thence

drive readers to the newspaper website, might it also be

that they become more concerned with how many followers

they have, fuelling a cult of the personality, thus

weakening the position of the newspaper and strengthening

the position of the individual? The counter-argument goes

that the more followers they have, the more they, as a

journalist (and therefore the newspaper they work for),

are endorsed.

For the news organization, what all this means is less

control. It has less control of the individual and less

control of the story. And this creates a tension. Clubs

still want to control the flow of information. News is

still (mostly) disseminated via press conferences and

statements to which only journalists are privy. But the

genie is out of the bottle. And once out, genies don’t

like going back in.

*************

Perhaps the most high-profile sporting casualty to date

has been Kevin Pietersen, one of many South African

economic migrants who came to England and cast themselves

as victims of the post-Apartheid quota system that had

supposedly - but not actually - reduced opportunities at

national level for ambitious whites. By 2005 Pietersen

had established himself as his adopted country’s premier

batsman, one of the game’s top box-office draws and its

most flamboyant and incautious self-promoter. Come the

summer of 2012, the ego had not only landed, nested and

earned millions but was busy thrusting its beak into a

brand new form of media-stoked maelstrom. Pietersen, in

short, became the Twitter Twit. If only the fallout had

been half as lighthearted as that irresistible play on

words.

Responding to criticism from Nick Knight, an England

batsman turned fair-minded and religiously

uncontroversial commentator for Sky Sports, English

cricket’s benefactor-in-chief, “KP” Tweeted his spleen:

“Can somebody PLEASE tell me how Nick Knight has worked

his way into the commentary box for Home Tests? RIDI-

CULOUS!”

Knight said he didn’t see it as “a big issue” and

declined to press the matter; Paul King, his producer,

declined to comment. Ditto, publicly at least, any Sky

executive.26 Pietersen knew, however, that trouble was

26 Hobson, Richard, “Sky is the limit as board rails at Pietersen’s dark view of Knight”, The Times, 23 May 2012, p. 58

brewing. Six months earlier, Hugh Morris, the estimable

managing director of the national team, had expressed his

distaste for Twitter, overruling his colleague, Steve

Elworthy, by decrying it as “a complete and utter

nightmare for those of us trying to manage and lead

teams” and comparing it to “giving a machine-gun to a

monkey”.27 Six months before that, Pietersen had reacted

to his omission from the team by informing his tens of

thousands of Twitter followers before it was officially

announced and portraying the decision as a “fuck-up”:

not, perhaps, the best way to curry selectorial favour.

Four days after the Pietersen-Knight spat, the England

and Wales Cricket Board fined him an undisclosed sum,

suspended for 12 months.28 A classic fudge, a very English

sort of compromise. The ECB had to be seen to be doing

something, for fear of alienating Sky Sports – and hence

the Murdoch empire - but nothing too punitive. A week

later, Pietersen announced his retirement from the two

international limited-overs formats, a notably untimely

development given that England’s defence of their World

Twenty20 crown was but weeks away. His salary – paid by

the ECB - was accordingly slashed but money was not the

issue. T20 was all the rage now, with new leagues popping

up in Australia, Bangladesh, South Africa, Sri Lanka and 27 Ibid

28 England and Wales Cricket Board media release, 23 May 2012

Zimbabwe, even the US: fewer national commitments would

mean more room for his multifarious freelance activities.

Besides, he’d already made more than sufficient money to

feel liberated enough to demonstrate that he wasn’t going

to be pushed around.

Fast forward just a few weeks and the harrumphing was

flaring anew. In August, in the middle of a Test match at

Headingley against South Africa, Pietersen texted a

couple of friends in the opposing team, allegedly sniping

at colleagues, in particular his captain, Andrew Strauss,

and – or so ran the conjecture – perhaps even leaking

strategies. Even as we write, the complete picture of

what would descend into a PR disaster has yet to emerge,

but for Pietersen it proved, at least temporarily, a faux

pas too far, committed by a man with a rare capacity for

alienating employers and teammates as well as a knack for

arousing jealousy. Had he been even 75% as good a

cricketer as he is, it is doubtful that we would have

written the word “temporarily”.

Whether those teammates contributed to further

embarrassment is still pure guesswork, though suspicions

persist. Set up in Northampton by a friend of Stuart

Broad, another England regular, a fake Twitter account,

@kevinpietersen24, had begun dispensing witty tweets,

purportedly from Pietersen himself but plainly parody.

“You know the saddest thing for me is that the spectators

love to watch me play – and I love to play for England,”

read one fake Tweet. Much mirth ensued as his image –

brash, naïve, childishly sensitive, far too selfish for a

team game – was firmly upheld.

The repercussions were extensive. Despite playing one of

the finest innings of his career in that Headingley Test,

Pietersen was dropped for the next Test – a brave

decision given that victory was imperative if England

were to stop the touring side from displacing them at the

top of the world rankings. England lost and Strauss

resigned as captain, eventually conceding – with

characteristic loyalty and understatement - that the

Pietersen fiasco had made his final days tricky.

Pietersen made a video, expressing his regrets to a tame

interviewer (his agent) but never quite going as far as

many felt he should. Come mid-September, he found himself

dropped from the party chosen to tour India. A fortnight

later, the ECB announced that the parties had reached

agreement “concerning a process for his re-integration

into the England team during the remainder of 2012”. Once

the programme was complete, and only then, would the

selectors “consider Kevin” for selection. “Kevin conceded

that the messages exchanged were provocative,” announced

a statement from Lord’s worded as if composed a century

earlier. “ECB is satisfied, following receipt of this

binding assurance, that to the best of his recollection,

Kevin did not convey any messages which were derogatory

about the England Captain, the England Team Director, the

ECB or employees of the ECB. Furthermore, there was no

tactical information whatsoever provided to members of

the South African Touring Party.”29

Whatever the eventual outcome, it seems far from

unreasonable to propose that this regrettable saga –

which, needless to add, generated enough inches of print,

inky and virtual, to reach the moon - would not have

arisen without the deceptive freedoms afforded by social

media to a generation of sportsfolk to whom honesty had

become a luxury.

29 ECB media release, 3 October 2012