A football obituary via Twitter

I was shocked Saturday to find out that Dwayne Haskins, a quarterback in the National Football League was killed on the interstate after being struck by a dump truck.

Haskins, played at Ohio State and won a Big Ten Championship and Rose Bowl his final year with Buckeyes. I was at the Big Ten Championship game that year in 2018 as a photographer. Haskins looked like a guy NFL teams would want to be their franchise QB.

He was drafted by Washington and never did become their consistent starter at the position. He was on the Pittsburgh Steelers at the time of his death early Saturday morning.

Adam Schefter, an ESPN insider to all things football, tweeted about the death of Haskins Saturday and broke the story. He used the phrase “struggling to catch on with Washington and Pittsburgh” to describe Haskins in his social media post.

The backlash from football fans and NFL players was quick. They were upset that Schefter’s tweet did not have a tone one would expect from talking about someone dying.

Schefter would later apologize but that’s not what I took away here. Another journalist, Bryan Curtis at the Ringer, discussed on his podcast how this is a symptom of current media consumption. Thirty years ago, the death of Haskins would have been a front page story on every sports section in the county. People would have found out about his death in an obituary type story in print or television.

In 2022, the obituary for Haskins is a tweet from Adam Schefter. That’s how many sports fans found out and for a good percentage of them that’s all they will care to learn about his tragic death. It puts Schefter in a tough position because that’s too much for a social media post to handle.

How we get news today has pros and cons and the death of Haskins illustrates the situation perfectly. Some reporters have a larger social media following than his or her company has subscribers. The ability of reporters to convey information on social media is limited though. The result is a poor attempt at an obituary in a social media post like we saw with Schefter on Haskins.

Trying to figure out where all this is headed is the rabbit the few reporters left in our country are chasing. At the moment, the best I can do is guess and make wild forecasts. Until then, I have to watch what I tweet.

Nathan Pace is the Sports Editor for the Greene County Daily World and can be reached at npacegcdw@gmail.com. His “Low Budget Sports Show” airs weekly on Facebook Live.