As a panelist at the 2012 NASO Sports Officiating Summit in Portland, Ore., Mike Pereira talked about how the media is changing officiating. He has been a trailblazer of sorts in bringing light to the nuances of the rules of football. Sometimes you will see him on camera, sometimes you can just hear his voice after a controversial call but he has been most active on Twitter this season, where he has 99,500 followers. He “tweets” live during NFL games on Fox.

As a former official and the NFL’s former vice president of officiating, Pereira walks a fine line. Many of the officials Pereira is critiquing are former associates and he is an official at heart.

“I think that the one thing you’ve got to do is realize that you have to do it with respect for the officials,” he said. “The thing I liked about Fox — when they first talked to me, they said, ‘We don’t want you to be controversial. That’s not our goal at all. We’d like you to be educational.’ I said, ‘OK, well, there are going to be times where I have to disagree with what was ruled on the field.’ So I established a set of rules for myself that included verbiage that I would use.”

Pereira said he would never use the phrases “blown call” or “bad call.” Instead he would say a call was, in his view, “incorrect.”

“Although I’ve been tempted once or twice I’ve never used anything worse than ‘incorrect,’” he said. “(The officials) ended up appreciating that.”

Check out his Twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/MikePereira