It took me awhile before I decided to hop on Twitter but I’ve been using it for a couple of months now. I’m up to 460 Tweets. They’re mostly just reactions to what the Sabres have been up to. The rest are about other major current event having to do with sports or stories on the web that I think are cool. I spend about five minutes in the afternoon scanning what my Twitter buddies have tweeted, and then I just keep it in the background while I work. Like most people who were hesitant to get involved with Twitter, I thought the conversations would be dominated by stupid chit-chat like how tasty their meatball sandwich was that they had for lunch. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of people who use Twitter for just that but if you build yourself a community of likeminded people it’s totally worth committing a small amount of time to. Most of the people I follow are Sabres fans and the rest are just Internet celebrities whose perspective I enjoy. If nothing else, Twitter makes it easier for me to keep track of everyone’s content updates.
The thing is, I’m a nobody. Occasionally I get an email from someone that disagrees strongly with what I’m saying or vice versa but for the most part, no one really cares. There’s no reaction on Twitter to the things I write on this space. But for people writing in the mainstream there definitely is. I imagine those journalists are pretty frightened at first with how their words are received on Twitter and assume that having a profile will only give the hecklers an outlet. On Twitter though everyone in the audience has profiles and actual content they stand for and by. Tweets are not just anonymous comments. There’s nowhere for people to hide and there’s more accountability that you’d think. The people that use Twitter enjoy connecting with others and they wouldn’t risk losing the respect of their followers just to let off steam on a boneheaded journalist. The haters are sporadic at best and those that exist have no audience. So there’s no reason to fear their presence plus there’s a simple way to cut them out of your life on Twitter: block those mother f’ers. Block them all to hell.
I bring all this up because the infamous Bucky Gleason, sports columnist for The Buffalo News, just registered an account on Twitter. I’ve had my opinionated differences with Gleason in the past mostly because he’s become totally ignorant to the fan’s relationship with the teams they support. He antagonizes his audience and that seriously damaged my professional opinion of him. Every now and then I check the replay of Bucky’s live-chats and I’m shocked at how badly he gets beat up in that place. People are rude and offensive and those are just the comments Gleason chooses publish. I can’t imagine how brutal the comments he ignores must be. I bet the News’ sports department has been flooded with mail the last couple years pleading for less Gleason. And honestly, that’s how it has been this season. Gleason barely writes about the Sabres anymore. He publishes his weekly current events column of the National Hockey League and then the occasional interview-based story. It’s too bad he doesn’t get to talk about the Sabres as much as he once could because he usually has a strong, sensible take on where the Sabres stand. He’s just burned his readership so many times no one wants to hear it anymore. So how does he fix that?
Well, building a strong Twitter audience might be a nice start. Part of the reason people like Mike Harrington, another sports writer for the News, so much is that he offers honest, off-the-cuff reactions to the sports teams he covers on his Twitter account. He responds to his reader’s questions. I guarantee he spends less than fifteen minutes a day on Twitter too. All Bucky has to do is say some interesting things on topics people care about and then respond to the polite, reasonable people that listen. It doesn’t take much. Show that you can have a sense of humor and that you’re capable to loosening the tie a bit.
Gleason has an important position in this town. He’s the lead hockey columnist for the only mainstream newspaper that covers the Buffalo Sabres. He has a larger forum to reach Sabres fans than perhaps anyone else in the media. We want to be able to like him but he’s got to meet us half way. It’s nice to see him embrace something new to bridge the gap. We’ll see how it goes.