In the fall, The National Sports Journalism Center announced the addition of Ronnie Ramos to its slate of esteemed columnists. Ramos is the Managing Director of Digital Communications at the NCAA, where he manages the association’s websites, reporters and social media strategies.
As the weekly Sports New Media columnist, Ramos will discuss the impact and implementation of social media, online journalism and technology in sports media. Before joining the NCAA, he spent 25 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, splitting his time between news and sports at five newspapers, including The Miami Herald and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow him on
Twitter.
image courtesy of aspectconsulting.eu
Read
Ramos' most recent column online (posted Jan. 4, 2012) on the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University website.
One job applicant for a social media position I was hiring for recently said she had more than 10 years experience in social media. Pretty impressive, I thought – especially given that MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter didn’t even exist 10 years ago.
Given the speed of change, it’s impossible to try to predict the future when it comes to new media. What I can predict is it should be a fascinating year for new media as the online world continues its unabated growth and continues to change the sports media landscape.
Instead, here are some questions for 2012, as we continue to barrel down the new media superhighway:
Coaches and Twitter
On Tuesday, the Big Lead reported new Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer banned his football players from using Twitter. The writer, Jason McIntyre, applauded the move (hard to tell if he was being serious, but that’s a conversation for another day). Later that day, USA Today said the ban apparently wasn’t true (Neither site actually talked or interviewed Meyer, or any other Ohio State official, and relied solely on Twitter posts from players for their “news” stories; another conversation for another day).
As I wrote last week, college coaches are grappling with the best way to handle Twitter with their players. Several have actually banned Twitter use by their players.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming year, especially when it comes to recruiting. As Twitter and social media use continues to become the predominant form of communication for high school students, will student-athletes start to factor in how they can – or can’t – communicate in college?
Some college coaches have embraced social media, such as Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari. In utilizing social media, he is able to portray his program in a way few other college coaches have been able to replicate.
Is 2012 the year coaches start to look at social media in different way? Instead of banning the use of social media, do colleges start investing in educating student-athletes on the effective and responsible use of social media?
The rise of NBC Sports Network
The NBC Sports Network, launched this week, promises to become a major player on the sports scene. For new media, their online approach will be significantly different from traditional sports websites such as ESPN.com.
NBCsports.com embraces a “talk” approach to sports coverage, focusing more on what people are talking about and less about traditional original reporting. Led by Mike Florio, who founded Pro Football Talk, NBC Sports now has “talk” areas for all the major sports. Rumors, analysis and conversation appear side-by-side with breaking news.
The question for this coming year: Can a major network create a laid-back, guy-on-the-bar chat website that connects with readers in a non-traditional manner?
The development of conference web sites
As major college conferences amass media rights and develop their online networks, a key question will be how content evolves across their platforms. In the past two years, schools and professional teams have learned to be their own media and use websites and social media channels to break news and tell their stories on their platforms.
The Pac-12, for example, announced last month that is has aggregated some of the media rights for all of its member schools. The conference also will manage all of its member schools’ web sites.
Look for other conferences to move in this direction. And then what?
Until now, most conference sites have not delved into breaking news. They have left that to each school to handle on its own terms. But as the conferences look to further develop their online presence and centralize content creation and dissemination, how do they handle breaking news?
While the majority of the attention will be on the major DI conferences, there will be many lessons here for Division II and III conferences. These conferences, which have struggled to get coverage from traditional news sources, have an even greater need to develop and grow their own audiences.
To keep readers coming back, conference sites will need to figure out how to deal with breaking and controversial news. How do they handle the hiring and firing of coaches? How do they work with their schools to handle the latest developments?
The future role of Twitter
There is little doubt Twitter has developed into a major vehicle for breaking news. Reporters rely on it as a news source (see the first item above about the Meyer Twitter “ban”). And some reporters incessantly post updates and see it as real-time reporting. Meanwhile, athletes and organizations use it to get their stories out fast.
For breaking news, Twitter is hard to beat. To get fans and followers to read your content, Twitter is way behind Facebook. At the NCAA, we have far more success getting our fans on Facebook to go to NCAA.com and NCAA.org than we do our followers on Twitter. It’s not even close.
Can Twitter close the gap, or is it a one-trick, breaking news pony?
Granted, Facebook is much larger than Twitter. But many PR outfits and media outlets spend countless hours trying to drive their followers to their web-based content. Should they (and we) just stop and use Twitter for the breaking news juggernaut it has become?