Dinosaur on the ark

There's an opinion piece in The Daily Mirror Saturday from Brian Reade which criticises Twitter for tweeting too much, wrongly, and too seriously about transfer rumours.  I was going to set up this post as new media vs old media, but on reflection I think it's something worse than that.

There's certainly a sense of the old and of nostalgia about the opening of the piece where he looks back "twelve summers ago" and ends:

Summer has always seen footballing rumours spread like bush fires, and in recent years the internet has flung petrol on the flames. But today, with Twitter, they’re moving at the speed of light.

Interestingly his opening anectode involves "two pensioners," ambling along, perhaps to highlight the difference between the old ways and the new, but whereas Brian Reade looks nostalgically back at the ambling pensioners against the lightening speed of Twitter, the rest of the world has moved on and prefers the speed of access and the unleashed freedom of information which social media encourages.

Brian Reade's central point is that people take silly rumours too seriously on Twitter.  Everything should be taken with a pinch of salt and we should move on and concentrate on other sports over the summer instead of worrying too much about transfers.  Does he have a point?

Being on Twitter a lot, I'm not sure he does.  I think he's picturing the average Twitter user as some sort of dupe who believes everything he's fed.  I don't think he gives us enough credit.  From what I've seen on Twitter most people take most rumours with a healthy dose of salt.  It's pretty much a game of speculation, who can give the most convincing arguments for touted transfers, who can make the most outlandish claim seems plausible.

My major problem with the piece is that it ignores completely the fact that newspapers are filled with enough transfer rubbish everyday over the summer without having to criticise Twitter for it.  The Daily Mirror is the worst culprit for publishing every stupid rumour.  What's the worst thing - quickfire 140 character moan about

a rumoured transfer, or writing a full article for a newspaper stretching the stupid rumour to breaking point to fit a word count?  How someone writing for The Daily Mirror can criticise Twitter for believing anything is beyond me.  Why don't The Mirror stop writing about transfer rumours and concentrate on other sports all summer?  This isn't even an old/new media thing, seeing as most of the Twitter rumours link back to/ originate in the established papers.

And it's not an old/new media thing, it's seems more a writer biting the hand that feeds.  A patronising little piece on how stupid and gullible football fans are.  "We feed you this shit and you fall for it hook, line and sinker, idiots!" is what it seems like to me.  A sports writing criticising the very people who he's meant to be writing for.  Even if we look at it from a different perspective, journalist as being informative, teaching us things, even here it's wrong, because, as pointed out earlier, The Daily Mirror is the worst culprit for printing bullshit transfer stories with arch-seriousness.  When reading their stories I'm often thinking, "how gullible are these writers?"  But of course they're not, it's just a game, the game of transfer rumours, where every piece has to be written as if the rumour is fact, as if it might happen - because otherwise there would be no justification for publishing it and they'd have to fill even more of the paper with lurid exposés of Ryan Giggs' private life.

The fact that The Guardian Newspaper group are changing to focus more and more on their digital editions demonstrates that the future is about being online, not in print, and that "old media" needs to embrace the "new."  The New, The Social, is about dialogue, not about slagging off your readers - and it is about slagging off readers, Twitter doesn't operate in a vacuum and Twitter users are the consumers of news, of papers, both on and offline.  Twitter and social media is no longer just a scapegoat for the established media, it is not even just the future.  It's the present, it's the here and now, and it isn't going anywhere.  And the sooner people like Brian Reade realise that the better.