Digital publishing proved a perfect fit for sports, unleashing a pent-up demand for more sports news, analysis, opinion and chatter. At first, the web was just another outlet for beat writers’ game stories and columnists’ takes. But it soon became a new demand on their time: In addition to gamers for various print editions, writers had to file online and feed blogs, and readers soon came to expect news in close to real time.

At the same time, digital publishing brought new competitors into the mix. Sportswriters were no longer competing just with their peers on the newsstand – now, they were competing with every other publisher with a web presence, including new digital-only outlets. As blogging software became easier to use, more and more readers took to their keyboards, bringing their passion for a team, sport or issue to a potentially world-wide audience. Most such efforts were dreck (as most of everything is dreck), but a few were smart, well written and came to command audiences of their own. More recently, some organizations have begun to wonder why they shouldn’t keep readers’ valuable attention for themselves, breaking news on their own sites instead of giving it to journalists.

Sportswriters have also been in the vanguard when it comes to adopting Twitter, the microblogging service that’s one of those differences in degree profound enough to become a difference in kind. Twitter started as a perfect vehicle for instantly publishing news updates and bits of analysis that would seem undersized as articles or blog posts. But it’s become a terrific venue for conversation between sportswriters and readers (as well as between athletes/organizations and everybody), one that usually avoids the toxicity and torpid stupidity of comment sections.

All this has driven a sea of change in sportswriting, for better and for worse. What’s better, in my opinion, is that sportswriting has become quicker and more muscular, and more responsive to readers. That should increase readers’ loyalty to writers (if not the publishers they work for), in part by reminding them of the value of professional journalists in ferreting out news and offering top-flight analysis. What’s worse is that sportswriters have been asked to do more and more things without having much if anything removed from their job descriptions. Being forced to race around like digital sorcerers’ apprentices makes it harder to catch one’s breath and focus on digging for hidden stories, deeper, richer storytelling and weightier analysis, all things that would differentiate you from the horde.

And of course, digital sportswriting isn’t holding still – it’s constantly being remade by unexpected changes, additional duties and new flavors of uncertainty. With that in mind, here are five suggestions for getting ready for changes that may be coming:

1. Get ready for athletes as social-media veterans: The first wave of athletes who took to Twitter were already famous before their first tweet – and many of those tweets were written by publicists. Now, athletes are more likely to tweet themselves, and teams aren’t always happy about it – witness the dust-ups between the Marlins and Logan Morrison over his outspoken Twitter presence. But the real change is not yet upon us. It will come with the first wave of stars who were Facebook and/or Twitter veterans long before they signed a professional contract. Athletes like that will adapt much more readily to communicating with people they don’t know via social media than they will to addressing a scrum of writers with notepads and recorders. In fact, they may not see the point of locker-room colloquies – after all, they’re already answering fans’ questions.

2. Think about location-based services: For all their wonders, digital services still aren’t great at delivering information that’s timely and local – it’s much easier to learn about the society of ancient Mongolia than it is to find a good deal on tires within a couple of miles of your house. Little by little that’s changing, with everybody from Facebook to Foursquare and Yelp and pro-sports leagues offering incentives for people to “check-in” to locations. There’s an opportunity there for sportswriters – if I’m checking into today’s Mets-Marlins game at Citi Field, I’m a prime candidate to read about that game and those teams and athletes, and get other information you or your publisher might want to push to me.

3. You’re a middleman, and that means you’re vulnerable: Teams are awakening to the idea that they’re publishers in their own right, which means the ancient, unwritten bargain between teams and publishers (publishers get access and readers, teams get publicity and customers) is ripe for being reconsidered. What will you do if teams (and leagues and athletic organizations) see news organizations as competition and take on the jobs of breaking news, delivering game stories and supplying reaction from coaches and players? How will you offer readers value beyond that?

4. Consider finding a niche and owning it: The era in which people chose Paper A or Paper B at the newsstand is dying – today’s fans read what they want from Paper A, Paper B, Web Publisher C, Blog D and so on down the alphabet. If your coverage is similar to everybody else’s, you’re in danger of not being read – so why not find something unique and outperform everybody else? That niche might be the minor-league beat, or a historical perspective, or long-form analysis, or the mechanics of the game, or scouting opponents, or the most lyrical writing, or the liveliest opinion.

5. Burn this list in a year – or maybe in a month: The digital era is marked by constant churn, so here’s a big caveat: This list will be obsolete before you know it. Or, conversely, one of these changes may only blossom after a series of false starts — how many times were tablets predicted before the iPad finally succeeded? And, of course, I may be dead wrong about what’s coming. Predictions are a dangerous business, but so is living in a defensive crouch – so keep your ears open, be willing to experiment, and always serve the reader.

* * *

This is my final column for the National Sports Journalism Center. As a farewell, I’ve collected 19 of my best columns in an ebook, Sportswriting in the Digital Age. It’s available for $2.99 (less than 16 cents a column!) from Amazon for the Kindle, and in other formats (including epub and PDF) from Smashwords. I hope to have it available from Apple and Barnes & Noble’s online store soon.

Heartfelt thanks to Tim Franklin for offering me the chance at a gig that turned out to be enormous fun, to John Oehser and Larra Overton for terrific editing and patience with my absurd filing habits, to Dave Kindred and Eric Deggans for being such smart company, and to Dan Drew, Brad Hamm, Linda Blair and Jeffrey Buszkiewicz. But thanks most of all to everyone who read and commented or emailed. I’d love to continue the conversation – email me at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter.

That’s an oversimplification – the Florida Marlins apparently had other reasons for sending down their young outfielder. But Morrison’s penchant for speaking his mind on social media certainly didn’t help him – and the incident is a reminder of the surprising speed with which social media is remaking how athletes communicate with fans and the media.

Here’s what happened: On Saturday, after the Marlins’ 3-0 loss to the Giants, Morrison was optioned to Class AAA New Orleans. He was hitting .249, but had 17 home runs and 60 RBI. “All I know, I go out and give everything for this team – play hurt, play through injury – and this is how you get treated,” he told reporters after hearing the news. “Doesn’t seem very fair or right to me. … They said, ‘We’re going to exercise the right to option you to Triple A,’ and I walked out. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t say anything at that point, I was so mad.”

Morrison has been productive in the NL East, but on Twitter – where he goes by the handle LoMoMarlins – he’s an undisputed All-Star. He has more than 61,000 followers, and his tweets are a mix of bite-sized chronicles of life as a baseball player, conversations with fans, and goofy asides (some PG-13).

Morrison can be sophomoric, which is no crime. (He’s 23, after all.) He can be blunt – in June he criticized Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria and the team’s front office after the firing of hitting coach John Mallee, and more recently he caused a stir with comments that were seen as critical of Marlins star Hanley Ramirez. (Morrison later insisted he hadn’t been criticizing Ramirez, though if he had been, he’d just be the latest in a fairly long line of teammates.) But he’s also been a terrific ambassador for the club – witness a recent series of tweets in which he arranged tickets for 352 Twitter followers (and their pickup at Will Call), or the constant stream of birthday wishes and acknowledgments he offers. He’s usually clever and entertaining, and always genuine.

The Marlins and Morrison had clashed before over his tweets – back in May, team president David Samson said Morrison needed to be careful about what he posted, and Morrison’s Twitter avatar is a cartoon of his face with his mouth duct-taped shut and the word CENSORED. So is tweeting what cost Morrison his big-league job?

Well, reading accounts by Marlins beat writers, it seems there was a bigger issue.

On Wednesday, Morrison had to cancel a charity bowling tournament scheduled for the next day, and the outfielder contended the Marlins’ community foundation had “dropped the ball” by not selling enough lanes in advance. (The event was intended to raise money for the American Lung Association — Morrison’s father died of lung cancer in December, after which he tweeted that “To the world he may have been just a somebody, but to this somebody he was my world.”)

On Saturday, Morrison and four teammates attended an autograph signing that lasted longer than planned; when he arrived at the stadium, he discovered the Marlins were supposed to attend an event with season-ticket holders. Morrison reportedly balked and consulted with Wes Helms, the team’s union rep, who said he didn’t have to attend. A few hours later, Morrison was on the way to New Orleans and Helms (who was hitting .191) had been given his release. (For good accounts of Morrison’s demotion and explorations of the possible cause, read Juan C. Rodriguez here, here and here in the Sun-Sentinel and Joe Capozzi here, here and here in the Palm Beach Post.)

But while tweeting doesn’t seem to have been what has Morrison bound for New Orleans, it’s also clear that the Marlins think he should talk less, in any medium. Witness this no-prisoners remark from famously old-school manager Jack McKeon: “Too many young guys come into the game today and think they’ve got it made. The darlings of the media, you know. Run their mouth, instead of tending to business. Go out there and try to get better, tend to your craft. The record books are full of one- and two-year phenoms.”

Morrison will probably be back when rosters expand on Sept. 1, and perhaps he’ll keep a lower profile. But he won’t be the first young athlete to become a Twitter star while still working on his on-field game – I’ve written before about why Twitter and sports are such a good mix, and wondered about how things will change once athletes arrive in professional ranks thoroughly comfortable with social media.

Morrison is a harbinger of that era, and evidence that it’s arriving more quickly than we might have imagined. Five years ago, this story would have been simply baffling: A baseball player spends his off-hours essentially text-messaging fans in a public forum? Two years ago, when very few athletes actually typed out their own tweets, whatever PR agency was purporting to speak for a Florida Marlin would have been fired for being too edgy.

Two years from now, who knows? Perhaps athletes will have learned to be professionally bland on Twitter in the same way most of them are in locker rooms. (Would anyone want to follow Derek Jeter or David Wright on Twitter?) But it seems more likely to me that clubs and leagues will have accepted athletes tweeting, with occasional wincing, and try to remind them of the perils of saying something in haste or anger for a world-wide audience. Media training, in other words – with the twist that the athletes will be their own media.

As for Morrison, he was uncharacteristically quiet for a while after his demotion, but then sent out this tweet: “Thx guys 4 all of ur kind words & support. Really means a lot! ‘A bend in the road isn’t the end of the road…unless u fail 2 make the turn’.”

Something tells me we haven’t heard the last from him.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry atReinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him onFacebook, or follow him on Twitter.

I’m going to change the focus of that one a bit: If I were designing a digital sports journalism program, what would be its basic building blocks? Before I try to answer that, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the folks who give me space for this column have a great sports-journalism program — follow this link for more on the National Sports Journalism Center’s undergraduate programs, and this one to read about NSJC’s other offerings.

Here are the things I see as must-haves for sending graduates out as digital-savvy sportswriters:

1. The Basics: I love the digital world, and it’s changing journalism in profound ways. But it’s easy to miss that these changes are at the margin: I think 95% of sports journalism is the same as it was in the print age. Can you tell a coherent story when you have 20 minutes to do so? Bring people to life? Craft questions to break through the walls of clichéd non-answers? Find the story everyone else looks past? Analyze a performance fairly, expertly and in a way that grabs the reader and doesn’t let go? Being able to do all that requires a keen eye and ear, a relentless curiosity, a desire to understand what makes people tick, a passion for big-hearted storytelling – all talents that work well in the digital world, but existed long before it. I’d much, much rather walk a reluctant print veteran through Twitter than try and teach a social-media whiz how to report and write.

That said, I do think there’s value in insisting from the get-go that we now live in a digital-first world. When digital publishing is an afterthought, as it still is in too many news organizations, our efforts will be hobbled, and we’ll always be playing catch up with digital-only competitors.

2. Multimedia: I don’t think every reporter needs to be a whiz at shooting video, or be able to churn out a polished podcast that would make a radio jock proud. But I do think every reporter needs to be comfortable with shooting basic video and contributing audio reports. When a reporter can’t do those things himself or herself, getting them done is less efficient and more difficult, and finding the heart of the story becomes a game of telephone between people with different backgrounds and skills. Moreover, multimedia offers a reporter another set of storytelling tools to play with.

3. Sports as a Business: The business side of sports is increasingly something fans need to understand to be well-informed, and for which beat writers ought to be the guides. This isn’t just true during periodic labor wars; it’s essential for understanding everything from free agency to split doubleheaders to why teams aren’t going to give up six extra games against the Yankees even if it would help their postseason chances. Digital tools offer sports sections great new ways for providing that understanding: For openers, writers can create or link to explainers about waiver rules, salary caps and everything else.

4. Social Media: This is a huge category, one that covers everything from developing a social-media persona to using social media as a reporting tool/publishing tool to following athletes via social media to the ground rules of what’s admissible information if it comes through social media. To that, add an examination of the boundaries between the personal and the professional on social media and how to navigate the borderline between them. Oh, and get ready to revisit this every semester, because it’s ever-changing. Social media is increasingly where we turn for news, analysis and opinion – it’s where the readers are.

5. Digital Cycles and News Values: We now routinely publish on multiple, overlapping cycles and deadlines. Writers push out bits of news and analysis on Twitter, write quick squibs for websites, craft stories of various lengths for a range of print editions, and so on. What are the best practices for making optimum use of writers’ finite time and effort? (“Do everything and stop complaining” strikes me as a lousy answer.) What are the rules of the road for how we handle developing stories? What are our trigger points for reporting rumors amid white-hot competition for information? How do we handle corrections, amplifications and things we dropped from earlier versions of the same story?

6. Curation: This seems minor, but it’s more important than most news organizations think. Being a beat writer is no longer about just doing your own thing and penning a story that makes readers buy your paper instead of your competitors’ – in the absence of a big scoop or an investigative package, readers consume as many accounts of a game or bit of sports news as they’re interested. Rather than pretending competitors don’t exist, being a beat writer now means also being a clearinghouse for those competitors’ scoops, analysis and opinion. If you’re good at finding and presenting that material, readers will trust you and come to you first.

7. Community: I think any sports journalist today should also be a community whiz. That means seeing Twitter as a two-way medium for interactions with readers and not just a broadcast service or beat writers’ clubhouse. It means regularly stepping in to comments on stories. (If that sounds like consigning writers to wading through moronic comments and anonymous vitriol, I’d counter that one reason comment threads are so poor is that readers feel like there’s no adult supervision, and act accordingly.) It means reaching out to the larger community of papers, websites and independent blogs. It means building relationships and reader loyalty through conversations.

8. Advanced Stats: I’ve gone back and forth on this one – it might not be applicable to all sports, and maybe doesn’t fit. But as I wrote recently, I now think sports journalists ought to be conversant with advanced stats, able to assess them and make them part of their reporting. Why? Because such metrics play an increasingly important role in teams’ strategic planning, which means they have to be understood for beat writers to assess what teams are trying to do and how successful their efforts are. At the very least, let’s put this one down as a highly recommended seminar.

That’s my stab at building blocks. If you think I left something out, missed the mark a bit, or have drunk too much digital Kool-Aid (or all three), leave a comment or email me.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

Details are here, from SportsBusiness Journal’s John Ourand. What ESPN reportedly plans sounds less like breaking new ground than about catching up with some good current practices; plenty of sites have created Twitter lists expressed as news feeds on their pages. What interests me is the network’s plans for using Twitter as a newsgathering tool – Ourand says it’s committing its editorial staffers to follow a list of 2,000 sports figures on Twitter. (Many of ESPN’s writers and on-air reporters are already on Twitter, of course.)

That led me to think about the best way sportswriters late to Twitter can get started. If you’re a Twitter veteran, this will likely be old ground for you, but here’s hoping there’s a tip you haven’t considered, or a newcomer you can pass this on to.

Why should you be on Twitter, anyway? The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy asked that question recently, dismissing Twitter as a fad. I’ll give you two reasons, either one of which ought to be enough.

First off, Twitter has more than 200 million users and is adding some 600,000 a day. Those users produce around 350 billion daily tweets. (Heck of a fad, Mr. Shaughnessy.) Sports fans were some of the service’s early adopters – as I explored in last week’s column, Twitter and sports make for a very good match. To adapt a line from bank robber Willie Sutton, you should be on Twitter because it’s where the readers are.

Second, as ESPN has recognized, Twitter has become a significant source of news. Teams, leagues, agents and athletes increasingly use it to break news, and athletes can be less guarded and more interesting in their tweets than in stilted locker-room exchanges. No reporter or columnist can afford to ignore such a significant and growing news source.

So how do you start? Here are five ways, which you can try all at once or one at a time:

1. Follow and Listen: I think starting by following 2,000 people will overwhelm a Twitter newbie. My suggestion would be to build your own list by searching for and following people you know personally or professionally, then following folks who share your areas of expertise and interest, whether they’re sources, competitors, fellow hobbyists or what have you. That should give you a list of at least 100 people. Though you didn’t think of it this way, what you’ve done is constructed a pretty effective news feed that’s customized for you.

Check in on that news feed every few hours, even if you’re forcing yourself at first, until you find you can scan efficiently, picking out interesting tweets from chatter. Over time, you’ll find that you discover more and more news through your feed than through your usual web rounds – until you’ll find yourself reflexively turning to Twitter to search for more detail about breaking news. (More on this here.)

That’s the foundation of Twitter – and if you do nothing else with it, it’s still pretty valuable. From there, build up the number of people you follow by seeing if interesting people are on Twitter, by checking out people followed by the people you follow, and by looking at who’s following you and seeing if you want to follow them back. This will grow your list without overwhelming you.

(By the way, one thing I like about Twitter is I don’t have to follow people in my circles whom I dislike. If they write something really important, people we know in common will mention it or retweet it. This is childish, but satisfying.)

2. Spread the Word: Twitter is where the readers are, so provide a steady stream of links to your work. (You’ll want to use a link shortener, such as the one within TweetDeck, so the URL doesn’t take up your entire 140-character limit.) Use the rest of your precious characters to craft a hook for the reader that makes them want to click, and leave enough characters for people to pass on the URL, your username and a bit of their own commentary. The shorter the better! Don’t be shy – the people following you are doing so because they want to know what you’re thinking and writing. Similarly, if you have a bit of news or an analytical thought, shoot it out there. Maybe it’s something you’ll develop into a column later, or an interesting idea that stands alone. Either way, your followers may want to hear it.

3. Talk Back: Twitter feeds that are just broadcast links are a lost opportunity for writers to take advantage of Twitter’s ability to forge connections. So watch for mentions of your Twitter ID, and if people are asking you questions or commenting on your work, talk back – they’re starting a conversation that it’s in your interests to continue. Not all mentions require a reply, and if you wind up with lots of followers you’ll have trouble talking to everyone, but most reasonable people will acknowledge good-faith efforts. And a lot of web critics are vicious because they assume no one is reading — a measured response can turn a critic into a supporter.

Now that you’re talking back, you can also retweet tweets you find interesting, informative, funny or bizarre – it’s generally accepted that retweets aren’t necessarily endorsements. And feel free to mix up your usual fare with personal asides and even what you’re having for lunch, if it’s sufficiently notable. You don’t want to let this personal stuff outweigh the actual news you’re providing, but a little of it gives readers a sense of you as a person, which helps build loyalty. I’ve followed a lot of beat writers more closely online after discovering they’re loose and funny on Twitter.

4. Avoid a Couple of Bad Habits: Don’t get cowed by self-professed Twitter scolds – Twitter is too new for there to be ironclad rules about what to do and not do. But that said, some basic safeguards are a good idea. Twitter is public and lasts forever, and you’re your own editor. Read over what you’re about to tweet before you send it. Then read it again. Have you misspelled or garbled something? Is the URL you’re sending out the right one, or something that you copied earlier? Are you posting something publicly that’s supposed to be a direct message (DM) to someone? Are you about to post something that you meant to search for? All of these are mistakes that are easy to make and can be painful.

At the risk of being a Twitter scold myself, I wouldn’t fight on Twitter. For one thing, it draws a gossipy crowd, making it hard to back down gracefully. For another, that 140-character limit makes it hard to have an argument of any substance. If exchanges get testy, stay professional – and suggest the discussion continue via direct messages (which are private between people who follow each other) or email.

Oh, and please don’t tweet gripes about sportswriting from the press box.

5. Relax: Twitter isn’t a fad, but it’s still pretty new, so don’t worry about it so much. People accept that it’s looser, more off-the-cuff and human than more formal means of communication. It takes time to get used to it. You’ll make mistakes (I’ve violated every bit of advice on this list) and you’ll find there are things that don’t come naturally to you. (My tweets are too long and I’m bad about replying.) It’s OK – we’re all figuring it out together. If you’re a newbie, dive in – you’ll be an old pro before you know it.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

For technologies, being taken for granted is a sign of success — one that can make us forget how unlikely that success was. Imagine if I’d told you back in the fall of 2006 that a web version of text-messaging inspired by one man’s childhood fascination with emergency vehicles would soon become essential for everyone from writers breaking news to athletes arguing about labor issues. You’d have thought I was insane, but here we are — and Twitter’s fifth anniversary is a good opportunity to identify five reasons the service has been such a huge success in the sports world.

1) Brevity is the soul of a lot: Twitter’s 140-character limit can be agonizing for new users trying to compact big news or a complex thought into an unforgivingly small space. (Particularly since you don’t really have 140 characters: Hyperlinks take up space even with a shortened URL, and you want people commenting on a tweet to include your username and preserve the essence of what you said.) That ruthless limit teaches writers to pen good bon mots, boil opinions and analysis down to bedrock essentials, and craft teasers that will hook readers. The web’s elastic real estate has opened up new opportunities for long-form narratives; Twitter requires you to be short and sweet.

2) The power of the speed read: In the technology world, “ambient awareness” refers to how social media allow us to stay in touch with our personal and professional circles with relatively little effort – quick posts about what we’re up to and/or thinking, and reading our peers’ posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or some other service. One reason ambient awareness works is that years of reading emails and feeds of information have trained us to be better and better at scanning lists of items and quickly extracting information. (If you’re objecting that the flipside of this is we risk getting worse at reading deeply and attentively, point very much taken.) Twitter is a perfect example of this kind of scanning: We’re so well-trained at separating signal from noise that a rapid scroll through our Twitter lets us find news and opinions we want to know more about, or reassures us that nothing much is going on. That’s great for readers, but it’s also good for writers. It’s true that few of your followers care what kind of sandwich you’re having for lunch. But it’s also true that most of your followers who don’t care will process that sandwich tweet so quickly that they won’t begrudge the time required to do so. As long as you’re not habitually off-topic, our speed-reading habits turn quirky observations or goofy asides into a welcome bit of personal touch.

3) Twitter fits the rhythm of sports: Sports is news, but most of it isn’t news the way a plane crash or a scientific discovery is news. I know the Mets are playing the Marlins tonight and one of the two teams will win, even though I have no idea which team it will be. Previously, accounts of games generally emerged only when all was said and done: We got a game story or a highlights package. But this isn’t how we watch sports – we do that in real time, constructing narratives as we go. Each twist and turn is good or bad, and we like to guess at how things will turn out, note potential turning points, and gloat, celebrate, commiserate or argue along the way. Twitter is a perfect fit for this: Now, beat writers can note significant plays, provide historical context, analyze decisions and so on long before their gamers are filed, and fans can talk to them and to each other as the game winds its way to a conclusion.

4) It’s easy: To craft a game story or blog post, you need a laptop — or a tablet, accurate fingers and a fair amount of patience. (I’ll take the laptop, thanks.) But Twitter’s character limit and quick-fire format makes it ideal for a smartphone, whether you’re writing a tweet or uploading a picture or video. This is one reason Twitter is increasingly popular with athletes: To tweet, all they need is a minute of downtime or in-transit time and a gadget that’s already in their pocket or on a shelf in their locker.

5) It feels like a level playing field: Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t require reciprocity – I can be your follower without you needing to accept me as a friend. (This isn’t true for “locked” accounts, but few if any such accounts are influential.) By now we’re used to the idea that this allows athletes and public figures to communicate with thousands or even millions of people in ways that aren’t possible in other media, and that’s obviously significant. But Twitter’s user interface encourages a level playing field in other ways, too. With the exception of check marks for verified accounts, famous Twitter users are treated essentially like everybody else – Bill Simmons or Shaquille O’Neal gets the same amount of real estate in a feed that’s given to me or that guy whose picture is still an egg. Anyone can mention another Twitter user, allowing his or her communications to be easily found by that user, or anyone else. And there’s a certain expectation that such messages will be seen, even if they’re not acknowledged or responded to, and a certain pressure to respond. In the physical world, I have zero chance of picking up the phone and reaching Shaq or, say, Bill Gates. On Twitter, it’s at least plausible that one of them might write back.

We’re still sorting through how all this works and what it means, but the last five years have opened our eyes to intriguing possibilities. Beat writers now talk with readers in real-time; teams, agents and leagues eliminate the middleman by bringing news directly to fans; and athletes who grew up with social media are continuing to use it now that they’re famous. The next five years promise to be no less surprising or startling.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

The subsequent argument brought out a lot of interesting things, from discussions of advanced stats in basketball to one of the best attempts at summing up the proper role of sabermetrics that I’ve read. But though the debate was a fairly rational one, I found myself weary – and wishing for a meshing of different disciplines in beat reporting about my favorite teams.

At its core, Lehrer’s Grantland column wasn’t an attack on sabermetrics – or at least I don’t think it was intended as one. Lehrer acknowledged that sabermetrics has dramatically improved teams’ personnel decisions, helping them find neglected talent and providing a check on executives’ instincts. But he argued, “sabermetrics comes with an important drawback. Because it translates sports into a list of statistics, the tool can also lead coaches and executives to neglect those variables that can’t be quantified.” Lehrer wasn’t saying those intangibles trump all, but worrying about the power of the quantifiable to sway us: “If we were smarter creatures, of course, we wouldn’t get seduced by the numbers. We’d remember that not everything that matters can be measured, and that success in sports (not to mention car shopping) is shaped by a long list of intangibles. In fact, we’d use the successes of sabermetrics to focus even more on what can’t be quantified, since our new statistical tools take care of the stats for us.”

Many writers critiqued Lehrer’s analysis, taking issue with points big and small. As an example of intangibles, Lehrer looked at the Dallas Mavericks’ use of the statistically underwhelming J.J. Barea in their upset of the Miami Heat, which sparked a lively debate over how to assess Barea and what stats the Mavs might have considered in giving him minutes. ESPN.com’s Tom Haberstroh makes a lot of good points worth noting here.

Beyond the Boxscore’s Bill Petti penned the best overall counterargument I found. Petti wrote, “Lehrer’s main argument shouldn’t be that teams are assembling bad teams because of a narrow-minded focus on things they can quantify. The argument should be that teams that don’t think deeply about what are the right metrics and how much variance they account for in player achievement will fail just as much as those teams that used to generally ignore analytical approaches to the game.

Data and statistics are not to blame for bad decisions — their misapplication is.”

Lehrer posted a follow-up on Wired, and the comments there are (mostly) very smart and high-powered – if only every web comments section were half as good. Among the commenters was Tom Tango, one of baseball’s leading sabermetricians, who offered this model explanation of sabermetrics’ goal and proper use: “What sabermetrics does is explain the numbers. Give the saberists the numbers, and he’ll tell you what it means. A saberist will NOT tell you anything else. What the saberist is going to do is tell you the LIMITS of numbers, of how far you can take the numbers. AFTER that, after the numbers have been parsed and exploited, THEN that’s where your scouts and your guts come in. And those are IMPORTANT activities that take place. … What sabermetrics does is allow the scout to focus on things OTHER than the numbers.”

There’s no shortage of critiques of Lehrer’s column, so I’ll keep mine brief: I thought his piece would have benefited from a thorough argument with a friendly reader before publication. (This is an excellent idea for any writer, of course.) Lehrer’s core argument was interesting, but the execution was flawed: Besides points such as Petti’s, his metaphors undermined his case and inflamed sabermetrically-inclined readers. Yes, a determined critic will chase any metaphor down a rabbit hole of applicability, but trotting out Philip Roth talking about a little boy experiencing an entire baseball game by watching numbers change on the scoreboard was an ill-advised choice. Sabermetrically-inclined writers and fans love the sights and sounds of baseball as much as anybody else, and Lehrer seems smart enough not to have suggested otherwise.

Still, Tango’s comment stuck with me – and made me think about what I’d love to see from beat writers covering my favorite team.

I’m not an advanced-stats guy by inclination – I see the season as a soap opera, and focus far more on players as characters and moments as echoes of team history. But I’m fascinated by sabermetrics, and even my limited understanding of it has made me appreciate baseball much more. I’m particularly interested in understanding how as born storytellers we’re quick to make judgments about character and pluck from what may be random good or bad luck.

My sabermetrics awakening came courtesy of Heath Bell, a mid-Aughts reliever for the Mets who shuttled between Triple-A and the majors, where he was inevitably whacked around. Sabermetrically inclined fans insisted Bell was simply unlucky, pointing to the then-foreign concept of BABIP, or batting average on balls in play. I didn’t see it – probably in part because Bell was kind of ridiculous looking, with a big butt and tiny feet. The Mets didn’t see it either: They shipped Bell off to San Diego, where his BABIP fell into line and he became a deadly closer. Lesson learned, at least for me: If nothing else, sabermetrics is a useful check on very human flaws in how we look for patterns and construct stories. More fundamentally, I simply can’t fathom why any fan of any sport would reject new tools offering a deeper understanding and appreciation of that sport.

Journalism is changing: Reporters in all fields are having to become conversant with multiple deadlines, publishing across media, handling audio and video, and being able to sort through data and crunch numbers. Sports reporters are ahead of most of their counterparts in many of these areas, so why can’t the same be true of advanced statistics?

Understanding advanced stats needn’t come at the expense of traditional reporting. The best beat writers are superb at getting players to talk about themselves and how they do what they do, and at asking managers and front-office people to explain their philosophies and react to events. When that reporting rises above the routine of postgame scrums and bland athlete clichés, it anchors fans to the larger narrative of a season and a sport.

I think – or perhaps I hope – that most reasonable people now accept advanced stats are an important way of measuring a player’s ability and likely usefulness to a team. That argues for familiarity with them being a standard part of the beat writer’s toolkit. At the very least, since more and more front offices look at such stats, beat writers need to understand them to explain why a team is making certain moves – or perhaps to ask why it’s not.

I’d like to know what advanced stats my team looks at, including any proprietary metrics. I’d like to know which team decision-makers take them into account, which don’t, and how that affects team moves. And I’d like the beat writer’s own take on what the stats show, and how to balance that against material gathered from solid reporting in the clubhouse.

Tom Tango thinks that’s an ideal for front-office types; I’d say the same for beat writers.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing [LINK http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com], and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom [LINK http://www.reinventingthenewsroom.com]. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com [LINK: mailto:jason.fry@gmail.com], visit him on Facebook [LINK http://www.facebook.com/jason.fry], or follow him on Twitter. [LINK http://www.twitter.com/jasoncfry]