It started out in the late ‘90s with e-mail, where you can type a message on a computer and send it to other people’s computers. People can respond back to your message, add additional information back and forth with each other and do it with very minimal effort. Nowadays, people use text-messaging on their mobile phones like Blackberry’s and iPhones. Gillmor described text-messages as short message services (SMS), where if blogs are becoming the opinion newspapers of the Internet, SMS are the headlines. Text-messaging is like e-mail, but can send a message to whomever you want instantly with use of mobile phones instead of computers.
With the use of text-messaging, or as most people call it, “texting”, it is has changed sports journalism in many ways. Just from personal experiences with interviewing athletes in the NFL, SI.com’s Trotter has noticed over the last few years texting has become a very popular communication for journalists to use.
"It has become a pattern, that when I call (NFL) players to interview them, not all, but a good amount of them won’t answer their cell phone. But if I text them, they will respond to me immediately. It’s kind of their way of screening people, and not be bothered with people they don’t want to be bothered with."
When talking to Boston Herald sportswriter, Ron Borges, with the use of text-messaging he has received information instantly from athletes or their agents to put in his articles without having to interview with them face to face. For example, New England Patriot quarterback, Tom Brady injured his left knee in the first game of the season on September 7th, 2008. The next day he had an MRI to see how bad his knee was and it came out on Monday that Brady tore his ACL and MCL on his left knee. With Borges text-messaging back and forth with Brady’s teammates, that day after practice when the players knew about his condition, Borges was the first person to know about Brady’s knee and was the first to put it on the Internet.
It just goes to show that the way athletes are adapting to the new technology communications of today, it’s a must for journalists to adapt likewise. Good journalism is based on interviewing and getting accurate information written out to the public, but within the last fifteen years, part of good journalism has now been getting the accurate information out to the public within hours or minutes. If journalists don’t use text-messaging and other technologies like Twitter to communicate, they will be stuck in the past and most likely without a job.
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