Mirror’s Oliver Holt kicks off “Inside Football Media” week

It’s “Inside the Football Media” week at Bleacher Report. World Football editor Will Tidey is talking to some of the sport’s top writers and on-air talent via Google hangout. The week kicks off today with Oliver Holt of the Daily Mirror.

One of my favorite parts of the 25-minute interview is their discussion of Twitter, especially when Tidey refers to Holt’s 230,000 followers and says, “In essence, it’s like the Rolling Stones playing on Copacabana Beach, the number of people that are seeing what you tweet.”

It’s about time someone made the connection between sportswriting and rock stardom.

“Anybody who’s on Twitter, to a greater or lesser extent, there are elements of abuse which sometimes feels a little unpalatable,” Holt says, “but I think it’s more than balanced by the interesting tweets, the decent tweets, the fair-argument tweets that you get. And you know what, I find that, actually, sometimes it makes me think more carefully about what I write. Some of the people who don’t like what I write might not believe that.”

After that, around the 11-minute mark, Tidey and Holt get into the nuts and bolts of Holt’s approach as a writer, including how he decides what to write about, and the difficulties of writing columns on deadline. It’s worth a watch and listen. I suspect the rest of “Inside the Football Media” week will be too. Here’s the schedule:

Tuesday: Gary Lineker, TV pundit/presenter and former England striker
Wednesday: Arlo White, NBC commentator
Thursday: Guillem Balague, Sky Sports Spanish football expert and author of  ”Messi”
Friday: Claire Rourke, Liverpool TV presenter