I was doing my usual rounds on the internet this morning, and was reading an article on ESPN about Anquan Boldin firing his agent, the infamous Drew Rosenhaus. I always enjoy reading about Rosenhaus and his antics to get money for his guys. I thought it was great that a player was going to actually fire him, since most of the players just do whatever he tells them to. I read the article and something else popped out that took me a bit to digest. Here is one quote from the article:
"I still believe Anquan will be traded before training camp," Rosenhaus said May 8 through his Twitter account. "I hope to work together with the Cardinals to resolve this situation by then."
You might have to read it again, but it's not what he said, but how it was reported he said it. "through his twitter account." Later in the article, it also said this:
"We recently made a proposal to the Cards for less," Rosenhaus said via Twitter.
Again, he is being quoted from his twitter account. I first found this amusing because Rosenhaus is never one to back down from media coverage or a guy that doesn't like to have a mike in front of his face. (Remember the Terrell Owens episodes from Philly). As I thought about it more, I thought it was strange the way his tweets were reported in the story. If you didn't really read everything carefully, you would have glossed over the quotes as if someone had interviewed him. But they didn't interview him. Nor were these quotes in direct response to a particular question. So, you have an unrelated 160 character blurb from someone being attributed to him as though it were a direct person to person quote based on a person to person question. Is this where we are heading? The person that posted this report on espn, did he clear Rosenhaus' tweets as pertinent to the rest of this story, or did he assume? While the tweets do appear to relate to what the reporter was writing about, when is it appropriate to follow up and ask?
Look, I like twitter. You can follow me @ad1220 if you want. It's a cool little piece of technology that is basically a text message to anyone and everyone that cares to look at it. It's a great way to give quick updates to what you are doing. "I'm at the airport" "I washed the car today" "Boeing stock is down" BUT......people have to remember, especially people like Rosenhaus or other celebrities, or anyone that evidently can be directly quoted from Twitter......these 160 character tweets carry almost no context with them. You should NOT be issuing responses or statements through twitter. If you want to write something that will carry any kind of meaning, get yourself a blog and write a long post about it. If you're important enough that people care about what you're going to say, issue a press release. I'm sure tweets that are taken out of context are already ruining lives across the high schools of the nation, it will be interesting to see which nationally known person is taken down because of twitter.
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