Newspaper publishers and their writers have had to adapt to the changing world of media and figure out how to compete on the internet. Apparently Vito Stellino decided “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and went right for it by tweeting a link to a porn site instead of a sports story. In this case, "beating 'em" may be a figure of speech with more than one meaning.

To this we say, here’s to you, porn tweet linker. We commend you for the big Twitter follow grab play you just made. Most likely your little Florida Times Union newspaper is struggling and you’re just trying to keep your job. You write about sports. You tweet about sports. But is anyone really listening?

They’ll certainly listen now, @vitostellino. Ever since you tweeted a link to the xHamster.com video “Hot Blonde F[bleep]ed Backstage” and left it up for nearly 40 minutes, you will gain many new followers who will click on all your dry links to marginally interesting sports stories in hopes of one day clicking on another juicy one. To keep it interesting, you will probably disguise it well in your quaint tweets about the inner-workings of the sports industry, Florida-specific sports activity and unknown player trades. But we’ll be watching. We want more xHamster.com surprises.

Sure, we could just go there ourselves, but that destroys our innocence and ability to use the excuse, “But, we were just looking for a story about the ‘rebirth of USFL and the need for a minor league in pro football.’ We weren’t trying to find porn. It was an accident.” Of course, knowing that you’re going to have to come up with a good reason for somehow being able to accidentally paste the link to xHamster.com into your ow.ly URL shortener and then put it in your seemingly sports related tweet without ever having been to xHamster.com on your computer, we’ll look to you for good excuse advice when getting caught clicking through to your “sports stories.”

Raise your glasses to @vitostellino. He’s a Twitter genius. And he may need a free drink after losing his job.

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