Many members of the media take advantage of the opportunity Twitter provides to interact with their readers. This gives the writers a chance to sample their readers' interests and opinions, and it gives the readers a chance to get an expert's opinion on their burning questions.

Or at least that's how it's supposed to work. But what happens if the writer isn't really more of a hockey expert than any other fan? Then Twitter becomes a soapbox enabling the writer to spread mediocre insight broadly and authoritatively, which doesn't help anyone.

The Flyers beat at the Inquirer is probably the biggest soapbox a Philadelphia writer can have for voicing opinions about the team. We are glad that Sam Carchidi is putting in the effort to interact with the community via social media, but it is important to us that he use his influential standing in the community to good end.

This off-season, some of Carchidi's tweets have struck us as being particularly misleading -- estimating free agent cap hits to come in well below historic comparables, for example, or fueling the Stamkos rumors with misleading cap numbers. This has us concerned about his impact on the Flyers community.

We often preach on this site about the foibles of memory, about how confirmation bias in particular can lead us to faulty judgments. And we are fully aware that we have a well-documented pre-existing opinion here, which confirmation bias can twist into an inaccurate memory.

With that in mind, we're going to employ the analytical methodology we often promote:  we're going to keep a complete list and track the results. In doing so, we will find out if we are overemphasizing a few bad predictions, and we will alter our stance if we find our memories have misled us. On the other hand, if our findings go the other way then we hope that our study will help mitigate his impact on the community.

We will start with Carchidi's predictions about Jaromir Jagr. Carchidi said that Jagr will score 18 goals and have 50 points. We don't know what that's based on, though. It seems very unlikely that Carchidi saw any KHL games. During the World Championships that led to many articles about Jagr's possible return, Carchidi wrote only about the Flyers. He also didn't cover the 2010 Olympics, so while he may have caught a game somewhere along the way, it's possible he hasn't seen Jagr play since the '07-08 NHL season.

Which is fine, if he used other methods of making an educated guess. Did he use Jagr's KHL stats or compare him to other players who recently made that transition? Did he compare Jagr's career arc to historically comparable players? Probably not, because each of those approaches suggests a higher number.

Given the importance of Carchidi's position and the weight his opinions are given, we think he has a responsibility to do something more than guess randomly. If time constraints don't allow him to put in that effort, then "I don't know" or "Just guessing: ..." are perfectly acceptable answers. If he's just going to wing it, then we're going to hold him accountable for the results.

This is the first in what will become a recurring feature. We will regularly review the results of past predictions and update the list with any new predictions Carchidi has made and the BSH masthead opinions. And to keep it lively, we'll add in a third important decision-maker, one whom we believe Paul Holmgren himself consults on many of his personnel decisions.