Sports Writers

Chris Broussard made his career during the NBA's 2010 free agency period. During that time he was the go-to guy about which free agents would sign where. A combination of having arguably the most talented and interesting free agency class and Twitter being mainstream made this the perfect storm. This stellar free agent class included LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Amare Stoudamire and Carlos Boozer just to name a few. With a large number of superstars potentially going to different teams, the whole world was watching wanting to know who would end up where. Chris Broussard was able to capitalize on this by being the one who got most of the information that everyone was after. He was extremely efficient at getting the information out and Twitter was the tool that allowed him to disseminate the news to everyone. This launched Broussard's career and cemented himself as the premier NBA insider.

The Internet has created a 24 hour news cycle where consumers demand to receive breaking news the instant that a journalist receives it. Such a cycle, especially in sports has rewarded the person who not only has the strongest connections with teams, agents and players, but who can also utilize social media to broadcast the news out the fastest.  Twitter has become the tool for breaking news because of the ease of use and short, succinct messages. When a free agent makes a decision of where to play all a fan cares about is what team, how much money and how many years.  This information can easily be written in 140 characters and posted on Twitter for everyone to see.  Twitter has become a tool for not only breaking news, but establishing reporters as the most knowledgeable, credible and fastest.  Having this dominance allows Chris Broussard to stand out of the pack and really influence people.  Having such a strong reputation has earned him a following that will instantly share his information with their followers and maintain his status as a reporter

Bill Simmons is perhaps the best example of a journalist who used social media to make his own career.  After having been relatively unsuccessful starting his career in journalism and being forced to bartend to make ends meet, Simmons created a website called the bostonsportsguy.com and started doing his own writing.  He stared very grass roots, emailing all of his friends and telling them to read the columns that he was writing.  From there more and more people started reading his column and he tried to distribute the link to as many people as possible through both his email and his friend’s.  This went on for some time and right before he was going to throw in the towel for good, ESPN saw his columns and decided to hire him to write a few columns.  As they say, the rest was history, Simmons’ columns were very well received and quickly became one of ESPN’s most popular columnists.  He has gone on to write for many different portions of ESPN’s website and was given his own website, Grantland.com, this year to be editor-in-chief of.  In addition to being an extremely successful writer, he also has an extremely large Twitter following with well over a million followers.  

Bill Simmons is a master of spreadable media, which is a concept conceived by Henry Jenkins in which he said that media is continued by the public.  With his first website, Simmons ensured that his columns spread by emailing the columns that he wrote and encouraging his friends to forward the link onto all of their other friends.  This resulted in him being discovered by ESPN and going from a being broke bartender with a dream of being a sports journalist to becoming one of the most successful sports writers in the world.  Furthermore, Simmons also took advantage of this ability to make every column that wrote to become extremely successful and currently leverages his massive Twitter following to assist in spreading his media to as many people as possible.  This is one of the great stories of spreadable media that exists and without Bill Simmons’ persistence and desire to spread his content, the sports world would be deprived of a great writer.