The Future of 24-Hour News
New Directions, New Challenges
Edited By Stephen Cushion and Richard Sambrook
Chapter 17: Twitter and the Rolling-News Agenda in Sports News
Extract
← 212 | 213 →CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Twitter and the Rolling-News Agenda on Sports Channels
ALAN TOMLINSON
INTRODUCTION
It would be a mistake to underestimate the significance of Twitter, its effects upon cultural consumption and everyday discourse, and its contribution to how rolling, 24-hour news in its constant updating embodies the speeded-up society (Redhead, 2015); Twitter has without doubt accelerated this (Hutchins, 2011). But we must be careful not to ossify the past. The print journalist of the early 1950s faced challenges from radio, and the “Monday morning man” reporting on the Saturday fixture had interpretive challenges in using the material others already had, aware that he “must not be the gramophone on which the same record is played” (Ledbrooke and Turner, 1955: 166).
The traditional press box was no luxury posting, the football writer huddled “with his typewriter in conditions which would never be allowed by any reasonably diligent factory inspector” (Hall and Parkinson, 1974: 14). If such journalists strayed from, say, the club chairman’s agenda, the price could be high. Bob Lord, known among the press as “the Khruschev” (USSR president) of Burnley, and a “passionate partisan of his town and his football team” (Hopcraft, 1968: 147), banned a Sunday and daily papers and six individual journalists in a feud over what he saw as media misrepresentation and intrusion. Getting to a player’s house? Ringing him up on the telephone “at all hours”? Lord (1963: 116) himself called these...
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