Life Imitates Art

"Facebook reports . . . Twitter confirms" the Burgundy-esque actor solemnly intones in one of the major cell phone companies' ads. The implication is clear -- social media is the source of our news today.

I knew it was just a matter of time until life proved this art, and we get it through one of the most lively of college sports personalities, Mike Leach. Yes, the fired Texas Tech football coach who once disciplined players for using Twitter and became the relentless subject of national criticism in the social media world for banning his team from using the real-time blogging system. The Pirate Coach famously said "a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time."

That was so 2009. Here in the future, Leach finds himself the beneficiary of a million Tweets of his pithy comments now that he's a satellite radio sports host -- having been released from Tech as a coach, purportedly for unusual disciplinary methods.

And the center of the on-going will-he-or-won't-he banter around becoming the next New Mexico coach -- that in and of itself a poke in the eye of "nearby" Texas Tech (remember, nothing is really geographically close in the great American southwest).

The story broke on Facebook. Then, OMG kids, was confirmed on Twitter. Both were terrestrial radio station employees -- the Facebook page now closed to non-friends, the KOB-FM tweet now deleted. (Once again -- fun fact, once it's digital, it lives forever -- plenty got copies of the tweet and have preserved them in news coverage -- see previous link). This lead the one of the top traffic sports new media sites, SportsByBrooks, to bite and off the story flew to the legacy media. The Albuquerque Journal joined in with the usual "unnamed sources." KOB on the TV side became one of the first to start to back away.

Since the new media outburst, Leach's lawyer has made the AP and most of the legacy media saying there's no way he's going to UMN, but of course, the story won't die. In part, because according to a subscriber-only story of the Journal Leach didn't convincingly tell the paper he wasn't interested.

And we don't know the whole story why? Because the ABJ has only teased the non-subscriber with the content preview for Google searching of:

Former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach played it coy Friday when asked about Internet-fueled speculation that he will take over University of New Me... MORE
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Could the Journal be guilty here of their own little internet fueling? Or just protecting their copyright content.

The saga continues . . .