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Published March 15th 2018

10 Influential Sports Journalists on Twitter

The Brandwatch React team takes to Brandwatch Audiences to find and rank the 10 influential sports journalists on Twitter in the US.

We love an influencer list, us. That’s why the Brandwatch React team took to Brandwatch Audiences to rank influential sports journalists on Twitter these days.

While never free from politics, sport can bring people together and provide at least some respite from the friction and hardship of day to day life. The people who tell those stories, who get people excited and highlight the important things, deserve to be celebrated and, in a highly competitive field, those who make it to the top are worthy of the followings they have built.

Finding the most influential sports journalists

Screenshot shows the criteria for finding the influential sports journalists

For this research we used Brandwatch Audiences to search for sports reporters and then rank them using influencer metrics.

We looked for sports journalists (defined by any of the key phrases outlined on the right within their bio) who were based in the US and were verified.

The accounts were ranked according to a selection of criteria that are added together to create their influence score. This is a measure of how influential an account is over time, based on the level of genuine engagement they are creating. While lots of followers, retweets and replies will help, the more influential the people they engage with, the better the score.

The follower counts listed below were correct and rounded to nearest million at the time of writing.

We should note that this is definitely not a perfect way of finding the most influential sports journalists – many big sports reporters might not include these words in their bios, for example. The upside of that is that you may find influential personalities you haven’t already heard of in this list!

Here goes!

Now you know how we found them, here’s the list itself. We were pleased to see an even split of male and female journalists, as well as multiple languages represented – the top two most influential people in the list may surprise you.

10. Tom Withers (@twithersAP)

Tom is both a sports writer for the Associated Press and a prolific tweeter who gets great engagement on his tweets.

He’s based in Cleveland.

Influencer score: 63

9. Gregg Bell (@gbellseattle)

Gregg is a journalist based in Seattle working for The News Tribune.

If you want to know about the Seahawks you should join the 25k others who follow Gregg.

Influencer score: 63

8. Tony Massarotti (@TonyMassarotti)

Tony is a long-time Boston sports reporter currently working as a host on The Sports Hub.

He’s got opinions.

Influencer score: 65

7. Dana Jacobson (@danajacobson)

Dana is a CBS sport correspondent based in NYC.

When we checked out her Twitter page she was sharing #MarchMadness stories with her 74k-strong following.

Influencer score: 65

6. Lindsay Czarniak (@lindsayczarniak)

Lindsay has one of the most impressive followings of those on our list with 161k.

She doesn’t over-tweet but she often shares behind-the-scenes looks at both her work and family life.

Influencer score: 65

5. James Koh (@JamesDKoh)

NFL Network anchor James Koh sahres commentary and GIFs with his 37k followers.

Influencer score: 68

4. Eboni K. Williams (@EboniKWilliams)

FOX News anchor and sports host Eboni shares content from lots of different people on her Twitter page.

She also promotes her work and book Pretty Powerful to her 68k followers.

Influence score: 70

3. Jeff Darlington (@JeffDarlington)

Jeff is an ESPN sport reporter interested in telling the stories of sports and the people that play them.

Influencer score: 70

2. Goga Ruiz-Sandoval (@BiciGoga)

Goga Ruiz-Sandoval is a journalist specialising in cycling. She’s based in Connecticut and tweets in Spanish to her 197k followers.

Here’s a recent report:

Influence score: 71

1. Carolina Guillen (@caroguillenESPN)

And our number one sports journalist according to our influencer data is Carolina Guillen!

Like @BiciGoga she tweets in Spanish and has the latest on the soccer. With 739k followers, she’s certainly earned her place at the top!

Influence score: 75

And here are our 10 influential sports journalists in a helpfully shareable list ? Why not give it a share?

Visualisation shows the influential sports journalists mentioned above

Are you a journalist looking to cover our influential sports journalists data? Email [email protected] for more information.

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