As you probably know, one of the first things that tipped off the public at large to a potential Randy Moss trade was a tweet from ESPN’s Bill Simmons that he meant to send as a direct message. Yesterday, Simmons shared with us the story of exactly how that happened, and let’s just say taping a TV segment isn’t the ideal time to get big news.
In Simmons’ words, he “was recording one of those ‘E:60′ roundtable segments” to air later this month when he heard from someone he says is a reliable source that Moss was close to heading back to Minnesota. Stunned, he scrambled to get more information before he had to actually tape the segment.
One of the better parts of the column is where Simmons details the struggle in his brain between “Pats Fan Me” and “Writer Me.” Initially, his fan impulses dominated, until he realized…wait, this could be huge news, and he could help break it. So he tried enlisting the help of Adam Schefter via a direct message on Twitter. You know what happened next.
The mistaken tweet was born out of good intentions – trying to cobble an actual report together, rather than just pass along a rumor. Of course, once he accidentally sent the tweet, he had to, well, pass along the rumor that Moss might be on his way out of New England. Twitter blew up at that rumor, of course, and everyone had their fun at the expense of Simmons’ meant-to-be DM.
And then, Fox’ Jay Glazer came along – and confirmed that the Moss deal was indeed going down. We enjoyed see Simmons describe celebrating being vindicated…only to “realiz[e] that I’m celebrating a Fox scoop that ESPN should have gotten” if his tweet to Schefter went off without a hitch.
Simmons’ takeaways: “We don’t trust anyone any more” (information overload and lying sports figures being among the culprits) and “Don’t twitter DM.” What we took from the column: you can twitter DM, just be very careful about it, be equally careful with potential scoops, and when combining potential scoops with twitter DMs, be as careful as you’ve ever been in your life…even if you’re distracted by filming a TV segment.
Additionally, we learned that Simmons can take what had to be a pretty embarrassing moment for a while there, and turn it into a well-thought-out musing on breaking news, how to deal with it in the age of Twitter, and what went wrong in his case. If every DM misfire results in columns like this, we hope those mistakes keep on coming.
Oh, and we also learned that Simmons really enjoys needling Jeremy Schaap. Seriously, third and fourth paragraphs.
Photo via Getty