Teaching Old Dog New Tweets
Bill Krueger / Poynter.org
Peter King didn’t particularly want to write a weekly online column and he certainly wasn’t interested in Twitter. He had a full-time job covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, thank you, and that was quite enough.
But King, 53, wanted to remain relevant. So he agreed when his editors first suggested in 1997 that he write a weekly column for SI.com, and later when they asked him to take some time most days to send out a few tweets.
“I was not excited about it when it started,” King told me in a recent interview. “But I always fear getting left behind by some new form of communication.”
King still writes for the weekly magazine, but he has plenty of readers for his online work.
His Monday Morning Quarterback column for SI.com has about 2.5 million weekly readers during football season and about 1.5 million in the off-season, according to a spokeswoman for SI.
About 433,000 people follow King on Twitter. That volume is staggering. By contrast, Mike Wise, the Washington Post sports reporter who was recently suspended for a month after posting a fake “scoop” on his Twitter account, has about 3,800 followers. On the other end of the spectrum, Bill Simmons, The Sports Guy for ESPN.com, has more than 1.2 million Twitter followers.
