In sports, “Election Day” happens all the time: Be ready

Tuesday sure was a big day in the news biz in the United States. Poynter.org helped media folks prepare with a couple of pieces Monday: 6 social media mistakes to avoid this Election Day, by Mallary Jean Tenore, and a pithy follow-up, The 8 commandments of tweeting on Election Day, by Al Tompkins.

Both pieces ran through the excellent advice we like to highlight around here: Doubt everything, assume nothing, verify, take your time, be certain, cite your sources and so on.

Election Day is about as big as it gets in the news racket. Anyone who’s ever worked for a news organization has war stories about pounding the pavement all day to cover the voting and parties, or eating newsroom pizza in the wee hours as the results come in and the stories go out. Your grizzled blogger has them. They’re boring.

It dawned on me, reading those Poynter pieces, that over here in the sports biz, we have lots of Election Days. We have the Super Bowl, of course, but we also have all of the other championship games, matches and races, draft days, trade deadlines, Opening Days. Some years we have Olympics or World Cups or both.

There are a lot of days when some segment of sports fandom is as charged up and hungry for news as the general public is on Election Day. It’s never a bad time to brush up on how to be a responsible, reliable provider or aggregator of information.