Monday began as most do for me – this summer at least – I was up early scouring the web for golf stories for SCOREGolf. I write its eNewsletter twice a week.
The day before, Phil Mickelson had won the Scottish Open, the final European Tour tune-up before this week’s British Open. It was newsworthy, and I was looking for an appropriate, local story.
The thing with the British papers is that you can always count on them for fun headlines. For example, the one from the Daily Mail that I ended up clicking on said: “Phil Mickelson Almost Blows Scottish Open, and Then Drops Trophy.”
What I stumbled on started a Twitter firestorm later in the day.
I thought the photo was funny, and I sent out a Tweet (see above). Somehow it was retweeted by Geoff Shackelford, a prominent blogger and contributing writer for Golf Digest and Golf World. From there it was picked up by the following outlets:
I always thought that my debut on Mashable would be for a grandiose advertising campaign, but alas, it was a tweet.
As I said in a follow-up tweet later in the day, I got my 15 seconds of internet fame and it was fun. However, as my colleague Jeff Brooke noted, “You could write an NNA winner and nobody would notice. But tweet a funny picture of Phil and you’re a star!”
Such is the media these days.
Adam Stanley 