Picayune Extra: Behind the Tweets
Picayune Extra: Behind the Tweets
The secrets behind the Tweet of the Week poll that CNN doesn't want you to know
I didn’t expect to launch paid-subscriber only content for at least a few weeks until a critical mass of supporters had signed up. But since response last week exceeded my expectations I’m moving forward and will be opening up comments starting with Thursday’s regular issue.
I hope you’ll find plenty to discuss in the week’s offering. I expect some zesty give and take, as the ranks of patrons include people who have challenged me warmly in other forums. One my goals has always been to provoke conversations, not end them with my pronouncements from on high.
Today’s supporter-only post discusses my process for creating the Tweet of the Week poll, something that a CNN reporter asked me about several years ago but then never did a story about. What was she afraid to tell the world?
The Tweet of the Week feature grew out of an item on my old Change of Subject blog at chicagotribune.com titled “Fine Lines.” At first, the “Fine Lines” were simply passages of clever writing that I’d gleaned in my reading, but starting in around 2013 I began using more and more tweets as I began spending more time on the Twitter platform. In August of that year I began including the best of the best tweets I’d found at the end of my Sunday print column. The first set published in the newspaper included these:
“Everyone says they want a fairy tale wedding but when I show up and curse their firstborn suddenly I'm a jerk.” … @AtomBombshell (a discontinued account)
“Slowly, Waldo's wife and Mr. Sandiego started putting the pieces together.” … @donni
In March 2014 I formalized the reader poll. It had only three finalists at first. The debut winner was comedy writer @DamienFahey, who has since gone quiet on Twitter, quipping about cable TV’s rabid preoccupation with a` missing airliner: "Next on CNN: We'll speculate about the location of the Malaysian jet with moms who pretend spoons are planes to get their kids to eat."
The contest has been going ever since. For nominations I rely on a shifting, confidential list of 50 Twitter accounts — even those on the list don’t know they’re on the list, though I’m sure some of them have figured it out by now. These are users who are both funny in their own right and gifted with an eye for the funny tweets of others. It’s from their tweets and, importantly, their re-tweets that I come up with a list each week of potential finalists that I then winnow down to ten.
It’s an ongoing process, as these 50 people on my “funny” list tend to be very active on the platform. I catch up to their latest offerings first thing in the morning, at least once during the day and then again late in the evening, bookmarking items I find amusing. All told, I spend about an hour at it each day.
Some weeks I end up with several dozen bookmarked tweets to consider as finalists for the poll. Other weeks I don’t even make it to ten. When I can’t find ten I like, I dig into the very long list of also-rans that haven’t quite made the cut in previous weeks.
Just about every week I get complaints from some readers that the list isn’t very funny. Sometimes I agree. I figure my moods from week to week are probably to blame.
I do accept nominations via email and I put them in the for-consideration list. Every once in a while they make the finalists and occasionally they even win.
The only rule is that the nominations must be from Twitter. This unfortunately excludes the wit and wisdom of those who write, “I’m not on Twitter, but if I were, this is what I would have tweeted…"
I prefer that the nominees be fresh, but often times the tweets that surface on my feed will be several years old. I also prefer that they be original. Plagiarism is a chronic problem on the platform — some of the thieves are brazen, others seem blithely to consider all such jokes to be in the public domain and occasionally duplicates are the result of the “great minds think alike” phenomenon. Whenever I detect lack of originality I change the attribution to “various” and leave it at that.
I used to consult other “best of” lists of amusing tweets posted across the web, but I found that many of those were visual jokes, and because of the nature of the Crowdsignal polling application I can’t include visual jokes.
For example:
I usually have a favorite among the top ten, but it seldom wins. I find it difficult each week even to predict which tweet will win. Political tweets tend to do so well that I have occasionally created two divisions — political and nonpolitical.
For several years I chose my personal top ten of each month and read them on WGN-AM’s “The Bill & Wendy Show,” a program that has since been cancelled. Every December for the past few years I’ve chosen my top 40 tweets of the year irrespective of reader votes. I’ve put these in a column in which I name the funniest person on Twitter based on the number of times that person’s tweets have appeared in the list of finalists each week.
When I compile the top-40 list this year I’ll make an effort to go back through all the weekly lists I’ve kept since 2014 and see if I can easily determine the all-time leader.
If you have any other questions about the Tweet of the Week process, email me.
I couldn’t be more grateful to those of you who are supporting the PS, and I think I’ve written individually to each of you to acknowledge my gratitude. Please be sure to jump into the comment thread on Thursday morning to get things off to a good start!