"Who To Follow"

By Chris Trevino

I never gave much thought to the people that I follow on Twitter. To be quite honest I was always more concerned about who was following me. But Tuesday’s guest speaker, Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated, convinced me otherwise.

“You will be a well-rounded thinker and reporter if you follow the people who are at the highest at their profession,” Deitsch said. The editor/writer went on to add that the people you follow should “reflect the people you want to be like” within the field of journalism.

He called Twitter the “looking glass.”

This nugget of information struck me the most out of the lecture. Not because it was a groundbreaking idea but simply because I had not thought of it before. While I do follow some great writers and journalists already on Twitter, they are greatly outweighed by what I will call Twitter “white noise”: the random, useless jargon on the news feed.

Since I’ve made that jump from student to graduate, I’ve realized things are changing within my life and my social media practices are certainly not exempt. Deitsch’s words helped me see that I need to cut out all that white noise from my feed and begin to find the journalists that I want to emulate. It is a change that I’m confident will not only make me a better journalist but better at social media as well.

Over the years I have made it a habit to read and digest only the best writers and their great works week in and week out.

So why shouldn’t I follow them?