The Football Association has provided a perfect illustration of how tight news management no longer works in the age of social media. It had intended to formally announce the 23 England players selected to play at the World Cup on its official website, but failed to allow for the Twitter effect. Theo Walcott, who was surprisingly not selected, had already issued a statement via Twitter and the names of all of the players excluded from the final 23 were being shared over the internet, before the FA’s PR machine had finally cranked into action.
The FA discovered, like so many traditional institutions, that you no longer have the luxury of sitting on news stories for hours whilst you go through laborious approval processes and get your act together. In the old days you could issue a story under an embargo and be reasonably confident that it would be respected by the traditional media. Now, when everyone is a potential journalist (including footballers, their agents and random hangers-on), stories can emerge and spread in seconds.