How Twitter is destroying football journalism

As another new year begins, with all the promise and excitement of a Shaun Wright Philips dribble, whilst 2010 fades away into obscurity and disappointment like a Shaun Wright Philips dribble - They All Count returns.

That's right, TAC is back, with all the pessimism, anger and barely stifled vitriol that you have grown to love.To kick off the 2011 we are not going to talk about Chelsea's continual drop in form and consequential dropping out of the title race (did that in November - yawn), nor shall we touch on what could have potentially have been the most comically charged signing in the history of the Premiership (as much as we want to talk about how good Ronaldinho to Blackburn would have been.) Instead we will take a quick look into a new disease, which I believe could be the catalyst to the dregs of the English football press becoming even more unreadable,lazy and breath takingly dull than ever before

 "what? leave the office? what?"

Now the world don't march to the tweet of just one drum

Since when? Since bloody when? Since when did the musings of a 19 year old boy, each illuminating thought expressed in less than 140 characters, become news? Yes, I understand that with 24hr uninterrupted news coverage, thanks to our friend the Internet, the concept of 'newsworthy' has changed slightly since the days of the printing press - but come on!

So who or what am I talking about? Well those of you who are inhabitants of the 'twitterspace' will probably be aware that Arsenal's teen midfield sensation, Jack Wilshere, has a pretty heavy presence on twitter. I do not use twitter, I have failed so far to see its charm or attraction, but as a reader of the general football media I am certainly now more than aware of Jack Wilshere's well used twitter account.

Now I am not having a go at Jack, 19 year old boys and social media of any kind are a hormone fuelled match made in heaven and it would be churlish of me to suggest otherwise. I am also not suggesting that Jack Wilshere news is not of interest to the public, as he quite clearly represents one of Englands great young prospects. What I do take issue with is so called 'football writers' using Wilshere's 140 character 'status updates' as the basis for what they loosely tag as 'news.'

So from a twitter post that reads...

'Bring Becks to Arsenal. What a great example he would be for all of us!

His professional attitude, ability and experience! love 2 work with him!'

  

...bred literally hundreds of stories. This fairly innocuous tweet (about a subject that has been played out so hard in the last week... but don't get me started on that - 'david beckham's loan deal = the new snood') which at best should make up a quote featured within an article, became the sole inspiration for numerous articles, many of which pushing 500 words. I am not going to put any links to these articles in - this time, perpetrators of lazy and boring football journalism, you shall not be targeted individually - but suffice to say a quick search for 'Jack Wilshere' on google news should be enough to seek out said articles. 

Is this what sports journalism has come to? '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 article, just to keep their sites constant flow of sub-standard and mind-numbing content rolling along.

For those of you who took the time to do the search I suggested above, you will have noticed that almost every news story that pops up about Jack Wilshere is twitter relate, even a story on what I can only suggest is THE SHOCK NEWS STORY OF THE CENTURY. Please, everybody stop what you are doing...

                                              ----------------------------------------------

Jack Wilshere sports 'Matt Cardle cardigan' in Arsenal dressing room

Arsenal bright spark Jack Wilshere has succumbed to the latest craze for cardigans, which have become a male fashion must-have thanks to X Factor winner Matt Cardle.

The 18-year-old midfielder has posted a picture on Twitter of himself wearing the grey woolly accessory while sitting in the Gunners' dressing room.

                                                -------------------------------------------

  
Disclaimer

There are certain circumstances in which I will allow using Twitter as a research tool. When it is to highlight things like 

this

and this

and mayby even transfer rumours - which I personally can never get enough of.

Now I should mention that it is the 'usual candidates' who are guilty of this, the low brow ones - you know. 

But fear not - Well written, intelligent football journalism can still be found on the internets :-

here

here

and definitely here