Twitter Tweeter

Some people are glad to work 18 hours each day – voluntarily – to gather information to inform their millions of social media followers. If an employer mandated such efforts, the employer would be violating worker protection laws. But if you’re passionate about beating your competition to be the first to report from your network, tweeting for a living could be a career for you. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Shams Charania (SC) was born and raised in Illinois. His parents immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan a decade before he was born. After settling in the Chicago area, both parents worked in the medical field. 

CHILDHOOD INTERESTS

SC’s personal athletic career as a player was brief. As a 5’9” basketball-crazed teen in the Chicago suburbs, SC was a member of his high school’s freshman team. “But, like, I didn’t play (in games), ever” he said. SC’s self-scouting report: “Straight shooter, no defense.”

EDUCATION

Following his public high school graduation, SC enrolled in college to study communications. 

BLOG LAUNCHES A CAREER IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Despite not sufficiently athletic to participate in competitive sports, SC remained passionate about basketball, launching a blog about the sport while in college. To provide content for his blog, SC began cold-calling basketball ‘industry’ types (team front office personnel, player agents and sports news reporters) whose contact information, including phone numbers, he found online. Often, his sources were willing to provide bits and pieces of information about players, teams, and general rumors.

CHALLENGE – PARENTAL DOUBTS ABOUT CHILD’S CAREER PATHDespite earning money from ads within his blog, SC’s immigrant parents remained unsure about the viability of his budding career path. “My mom was, like, ‘It’s not too late to change your major,” recalled SC. 

CHALLENGE – YOUTH WITH ITS APPARENT INEXPERIENCE

“The good thing about the phone or texting is they’re not gonna ask how old you are” said SC. 

While still a college student, SC was hired by Yahoo to continue his blog and provide content for their NBA news stories. 

CHALLENGE – COMPETING WITH YOUR FELLOW EMPLOYEE OR BOSS

After being hired by Yahoo sports, SC began to gather increasing amounts of information ahead of his competitors outside of Yahoo but then also sooner than the manager who had hired him at Yahoo. It started as a friendly competition but eventually, SC decided to retreat from that internal business pressure and take the opportunity to get in on the ‘ground floor’ of The Athletic, an emerging social media platform. This turned out to be a good risk since the New York Times soon partnered with The Athletic to provide much of the Times sports news. 

SC has two million followers on Twitter, who know him by the mononym Shams. He is more famous than a majority of the NBA players. He is – as of mid 2023 – employed by the sports sites The Athletic and Stadium and by the sports-betting company FanDuel.

N.B.A. ‘SCOOPS MERCHANT’

SC constantly texts with NBA executives, D.M.s with players, phone calls agents and reads NBA related news reports to stay up with NBA developments – while always hustling to stay ahead of his competition.

“If I wasn’t a reporter, I’d still be obsessing over all this stuff, in a basement somewhere,” confessed SC. Proof of his professional dedication to gathering and reporting NBA related information can be found in review of SC’s phone screen-time page. As a typical example, one day’s previous day’s usage was 18 hours. Other days revealed upward of seventeen hours. One day’s usage dipped to 16 hours, 34 minutes. “My mom’s birthday,” SC explained. 

Once on a family trip to the Grand Canyon, SC was distraught to find that he had no cell service. A nearby library had Wi-Fi. “I was there the whole time,” he said. He searched his phone for a photo to prove that he had at least seen the canyon but couldn’t find one.

A typical conversation with a potential source – always out of earshot of interlopers – includes SC’s questions for clarification and confirmation: “Is that what you’re hearing, or are you asking what I know?”

CAREER SATISFACTION

SC’s networking has paid off in unexpected ways. In 2020, he was credited by many with breaking the news of then President Donald Trump’s positive COVID test. Some have speculated that SC simply saw Trump’s own announcement, which the President tweeted the same minute as SC’s, and quickly re-stated it. SC has declined to clarify that situation, stating, “That’ll be a story for my book.”

One of the busiest times of the year for SC is during the annual NBA’s draft of college players. During the 2023 draft, which SC attended at the draft hotel headquarters, he retreated to the lobby’s work-center annex to field a call with a brisk “What (sic) up?” He returned from one of these calls, proudly displaying his draft of a tweet reporting that the Boston Celtics were in ‘strong talks” to complete a trade. He winked and hit Tweet. An agent sidled up to the table where he was working, to debate a prospect’s true height: “He’s 6’6” without shoes,” the agent said.

Within an hour, the trade scoop video had garnered more than 600,000 views and 2,000,000 impressions. SC had no plans to leave the draft HQ hotel that day. His summer aspirations consisted mostly of staying home and working his sources with calls and texts. “If you miss even a day, you fall so far behind,” said SC. “That scares me.”

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This career story is based on several sources including an article written by Dan Greene, published by The New Yorker magazine on July 3, 2023 plus Wikipedia internet research.