FLAGLER: #AthleteTweets: Twitter and sports media

Twitter is the best self-confidence builder ever. Let’s say I wake up on an early Sunday afternoon and decide I’m feeling ambitious. So I make a huge omelet with bacon and veggies with toast and orange juice.

Now I could sit down and eat this delicious meal in front of a football game by myself, but then no one would appreciate this amazing feat. What if my roommates aren’t around to compliment me? I’m just supposed to sit and eat it? When it’s gone, there will be no proof left of my greatness.

Well, that’s where Twitter comes in. I can tweet about my breakfast, or about what I’m doing later this afternoon, or about how boring my history class was or whatever hilarious joke I just thought of.

The more I tweet, the more digital proof there is of my self-worth.

And the best part is, I can pretend that all 70 of my followers deeply care. Even if they’re cursing me for my terrible, mundane and egotistical tweets, in my mind, they’re hanging on my every word and refreshing their browsers just waiting for me to impart another 140-character piece of tweet-wisdom.

All right, so maybe my self-confidence isn’t quite this low. But you can see why Twitter has caught on so fast and become the next big ‘social networking’ phenomenon. Twitter allows us to share anything we want, whenever we want, with whomever we choose and pretend that other people care.

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes Twitter addictive also bogs it down with junk and makes it less effective as a social network. It’s so easy to communicate that most of its content ends up meaningless.

That’s why a minor event such as Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards becomes culturally significant. We feel personally tied to celebrities because we ‘follow’ them, which leads to millions of tweets, which leads to media coverage and suddenly a minor event at a completely meaningless awards show blows up.

But Twitter’s one saving grace is what it can mean for the media. Many high-profile athletes, particularly NBA stars, have Twitter accounts with massive amounts of fans following them. So it’s especially influential to sports media.

Shaquille O’Neal probably started the NBA tweet craze and now has more than 2.4 million followers. Magic center Dwight Howard has more than 1.1 million. Even new BU men’s basketball coach Pat Chambers has 437.

With all these fans getting information directly from the sports figures they care about, the business of providing sports news has totally changed and will most likely become even more different in the future.

The most obvious change Twitter has made on sports extends from the public’s fascination with athletes and celebrities that now have found a new online outlet.

For example, last March, then-Milwaukee Bucks power forward Charlie Villanueva posted a tweet from the locker room at halftime that said, ‘In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt’hellip;. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.’ His coach, Scott Skiles learned about the tweet and reprimanded Villanueva, who now has about 60,000 followers.

Although Villanueva isn’t a megastar, it humanized him in a culture where fans can sometimes forget the athletes we religiously follow are real people.

NBA players’ Twitter addiction can affect their jobs just as it would a normal guy sitting in his office and tweeting instead of writing an expense report.

But Twitter’s place in sports goes further than just celebrity obsession and tabloid fodder. It completely changes the general flow of information from the athletes to the media to the public. The newsmakers ‘- athletes ‘- can simply give information that the media hasn’t even picked up on yet directly to their followers.

Over the summer, Minnesota Timberwolves big man Kevin Love broke the story that his coach was retiring before anyone in the media knew. ‘Today is a sad day…Kevin McHale will NOT be back as head coach next season,’ Love tweeted. The next day, the story was all over ESPN and the Associated Press.

It would be a gross overstatement to say that Twitter will make the sports media business obsolete, but it certainly jumbles the established structure that the sports media has worked in for many years.

For athletes, this is probably a good thing. Twitter gives stars such as Bengals wide receiver Chad Ocho Cinco the ability to talk directly to fans and give his unfiltered side of the story. Whether you love Ocho Cinco or hate him doesn’t matter. But I’m sure his teammates and coaches would tell you that when he focuses on his game on the field instead of the distractions off of it, he becomes much more valuable to the Bengals.

‘It like (sic) the negative,’ Ocho Cinco tweeted to a fan about the media on Monday. ‘I’m glad there’s Twitter, you get the real me not what the media makes me out to be. . .’

For sports writers like me getting into the business, Twitter is probably not so great. Competition between websites, newspapers and TV networks to break a news story first has always been heated.

Now, with more media outlets using Twitter to break stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if in two years, I find myself sitting at a computer all day sifting through Twitter’s endless self-congratulatory junk to find some nugget of newsworthy information.

I probably won’t be too upset though, as long as my boss doesn’t catch me tweeting on the job.