Pulitzer Winner Loves Twitter

Aren't print media folks supposed to be anti-microblogging? Probably, and Buzz Bissinger knows it. "How the hell did I--a Pulitzer Prize winner, for chrissakes," he wonders, "fall in love with Twitter?" He tells the story in The New Republic.

"I cannot pinpoint the precise moment in time when the transformation kicked in," he writes, "the shift from the occasional one-night stand with someone I thought of as a vapid twit into a torrid love affair of passionate tweets." He knows roughly how it happened, though; he started responding to critics on Twitter while drunk, telling one to "fuck off." He finds himself delighted: "with Twitter, I now had an outlet. I used profanity, because that's the way I talk ..." He's now constantly checking his number of followers and tweeting regularly, finding it "cathartic, particularly for someone used to writing long-form narrative where the odds of producing a commercially successful book have become worse than seven-deck blackjack." He admits to being "hooked":

I like the staccato of anger and vitriol that Twitter provides. I like being nasty as long as it has some basis in fact, at least most of the time. When someone says something inane, an easy mark in Twitterdom, I enjoy douche juicing them as if some kind of human skunk. There is also a certain amount of realistic self-preservation involved, as I realize that the businesses from which I make my living--books, magazines, and newspapers--are potentially crumbling. In other words, if you can’t beat 'em, you join 'em.