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  • Transfer Talk: What the Twit was that about?

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    ccs-54-1402640076_thumb.jpgSome people will do anything for publicity.

    It's the times we live in, where news travels literally at the speed of light, and everyone is looking for an edge. This doesn't exclude the traditional media, who have had to accept new media - particularly social networking like Twitter and Facebook - as a means to remain competitive with and as relevant as the TMZ's, Huffington Posts and (ahem) Canadian Soccer News' out there.

    So it's no surprise, then, that some members of the "traditional" media have succumbed to the unfortunate side effect of today's fact-paced information age of over-hyping "nothing" stories in order to gain an audience.

    Today gave us no greater example of this phenomenon, via The Guardian sports editor Ian Prior, who tweeted around 10:30am (EST) that his paper would be posting a huge transfer exclusive on its website around four hours later.

    [PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]

    Major - and boy do I mean it - football exclusive coming up on guardian.co.uk sometime around 5.30.
    This naturally set Twitter alight with speculation, as surely a reputable source such as The Guardian wouldn't resort to cheap parlour tricks just to gain more hits, right?

    Prior even emphasized the gravity of his paper's scoop by adding "boy do I mean it" to his teaser tweet, showing the football world that the impending story was serious business.

    Twitter users - as they are wont to do - took the teaser and ran with it, spawning the hashtag #guardianexclusive to amalgamate all of the possible stories that Prior's original post could be referring to, both realistic and absurd. But even the most cynical person couldn't have imagined just how much of a non-story Prior's super-duper exclusive would be.

    Shortly after 5:30pm GMT, Guardian reporter David Hynter relayed to the awaiting football world that Inter Milan would be (possibly) bidding for Tottenham starlet Gareth Bale, in the amount of £40 million.

    In six months' time.

    Maybe.

    Prior immediately got heat from Twitter users the world over, frustrated by the hyperbole over a complete non-issue from the self-professed "largest English language paper on the web apart from The New York Times."

    Unfortunately, this sort of thing will happen more often as sources for news become more fractured, and the need to get noticed becomes more of a factor.

    Some other transfer talk from around Europe Thursday:

    England

    France

    Italy

    Ukraine

    Germany

    • Srdjan Lakic agrees to join Wolfsburg.

    Scotland

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