Post by Lark11 on Nov 27, 2014 11:35:25 GMT -5
www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/baseballs-teen-age-twitter-reporters?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter
THE SPORTING SCENE
NOVEMBER 25, 2014
Baseball’s Teen-Age Twitter Reporters
BY JOHN WOLFSON
When news broke, on Sunday afternoon, that the Boston Red Sox, smarting from a second last-place finish in three seasons, were about to sign the free-agent slugger Hanley Ramirez to a big new contract, the only person in the country more relieved than Sox fans may have been a high-school freshman from Missouri named Jake Wesley. A few hours earlier, Wesley, having learned of the impending signing from what he says is a source within the Red Sox organization, had excitedly posted his big scoop to Twitter. Rather than the acclaim he’d expected, though, his tweet was met with silence—no confirmations from the big-name reporters whose attention he’d hoped to capture. Had he been given bad information? “I was getting really nervous,” Wesley told me. So he finally sent a tweet to the respected baseball writer Jon Heyman, of CBS Sports, asking whether he’d heard any news about Ramirez. “If you think it’s true,” he says Heyman told him, “then stick with it, and you’ll get the credit.” And not long after, he did.
Heyman eventually confirmed the Ramirez deal, and acknowledged the contributions of both Wesley and another Twitter reporter, Christopher Meola, who’d also gotten the jump on the information. Early the next day, Wesley, along with another baseball analyst on Twitter named Mibelt Rodriguez, accurately reported that the Red Sox were about to sign another prominent free agent, the third baseman Pablo Sandoval. Somehow, a fourteen-year-old kid from the St. Louis area had been involved in two of the biggest scoops of the baseball off-season.
Wesley’s work came just days after Devan Fink, who is thirteen, learned from a source that the free-agent first baseman Billy Butler was close to signing with the Oakland A’s. Fink tweeted the news and then asked a friend on Twitter, the eighteen-year-old college freshman Robert Murray, whether he’d heard anything about Butler. Murray checked his own sources and tweeted that the deal was for three years and thirty million dollars. “They had the story, but they couldn’t get it out,” Ken Rosenthal, a Fox Sports baseball reporter, told me. “I don’t know how many Twitter followers they have, but it wasn’t enough to really get the news out.” So Fink contacted Rosenthal, asking him to confirm the agreement in exchange for crediting Fink and Murray. The details all checked out, and Rosenthal made sure to credit the amateur reporters on both Twitter and television.
After working to confirm the scoops by Fink and Murray, Rosenthal said that he was overwhelmed by similar requests. “I’m getting tons of tweets every day from young kids: ‘Hey, I’ve got a story, can you confirm it?’ It’s funny in one way, but it’s getting to be a little much in another.” Rosenthal may traffic in the flow of information, but he nonetheless marvelled at the success of some of these neophytes. “I am frankly surprised that these guys have done this well,” he said. “They’re working hard and they deserve to be recognized, but, I mean, who are these execs that are willing to reveal sensitive details to teen-agers?”
The granddaddy of these very young amateurs is Chris Cotillo, who is nineteen. In 2013, Cotillo reached out to editors at the sports-news Web site SB Nation, asking whether anyone needed writing help. At first, he wrote for free. But after landing two big scoops while still in high school—the trades of the pitchers Doug Fister and Ricky Nolasco—he soon had a paying gig. Today Cotillo is a freshman studying journalism at the University of North Carolina, as well as a staffer at SB Nation’s MLB Daily Dish. The influx of teen-agers “points to a change in the whole journalism business,” Cotillo told me. “Now all you need is a laptop, whether it’s in your bedroom or at Fenway Park.” Perhaps, but that still doesn’t answer Rosenthal’s question: What self-respecting insider divulges information to a teen-ager? “There are a bunch of sources inside baseball—team executives, agents, players—who have information,” Cotillo said. “They get inquiries from probably dozens of reporters a day, even more now that so many young, independent reporters are doing this. The thing you have to do if you want to get relationships is establish it as a two-way street, showing you can help them out, too.” Which tends to raise another question: How can one of these youngsters possibly help out a baseball bigwig? “I don’t want to get too specific,” Cotillo said. “That’s sort of a trade secret.”
Fink said that he used his age and inexperience to his advantage when developing the source he worked with for his Butler scoop. “He understood that I’m probably a pioneer,” Fink told me. “No middle schooler has been able to break scoops like this before. He saw my Web site and realized that I was taking this very seriously, and I think he maybe wanted to help me a little.” Fink started his site about two years ago, after his grandfather—a huge Phillies fan—died. “My mom told me I could kind of start a journal to continue to talk to him,” Fink said. Today, his site gets between one and two thousand views a day.
Fink isn’t sure whether he wants to eventually become a professional journalist, but he said there’s no doubt that many kids do. “There are plenty of guys in high school trying to be Chris Cotillo or Robert Murray,” he said. “But it’s hard to tell how many of them have a legitimate shot.” For his part, Rosenthal thinks that Cotillo is a future star in the business. “Cotillo, he is a keeper,” Rosenthal said. “He will do this and do it well. Now, there’s a lot of Cotillo juniors out there, and I don’t know about all of them.”
Undoubtedly, though, some of them will make it, too. “Either luck is involved, or we’re really seeing a new generation of baseball journalists,” Cotillo said. The development is nonetheless befuddling to Rosenthal: “I just got a text from a professional colleague of mine,” he said. “He asked me, ‘When did all these kids stop wanting to become athletes, and start wanting to become us?’ ”