The constructive dismissal of the English football press
Local football media matters, whether its owners like it or not
Everton have been docked ten points for financial misdoings.
It's the grim but inevitable outcome of some extraordinary mismanagement and honking transfers that didn't even give Toffees supporters the sweetener of success in exchange for their club's poisonous practices.
Football matters should be decided on the football field, points tallies included, so it's always a shame when points deductions are necessary. It's a dire consequence that leaves supporters with a bitter taste. So it goes.
Supporters shouldn't be punished for the shenanigans of club owners but they are unavoidable collateral damage. We've allowed the relationship between owners and supporters to become so skewed that they can't be adequately separated.
Deciding football matters on the football field doesn't just mean opposing points deductions for financial regulation breaches. It means that cheating on the books is cheating on the pitch.
Sadly, the entire sport seems to have lost sight of that fact.
The constructive dismissal of the English football press
There was a time in my youth when I wanted to be a journalist. Though I was mad about sport it was the more serious side of the fourth estate that attracted me. Looking at news, politics and current affairs now, I don't know what possessed me.
When I was deciding whether to do A-Levels, and subsequently which ones to take, I would tell my teachers, when prompted, that journalism was the aim. I was keen on writing and curious about society and the world. And I wanted to have a career with meaning.
Then came crunch time and I cast English into the dirt, moving on instead to study the humanities. I regret that for many reasons but guiding myself away from journalism isn't one of them. Nevertheless, it's a career I hold in high esteem.
Influence might be corrupting but I believe that journalism is important because society needs knowledge, and power needs checks and balances. Nothing in life is pure but there’s a nobility of intent about any journalist worth a damn.
Yet we live in a digital world and the news industry has wholly fumbled its transition from print to pixels. Online newspaper businesses were clueless from the start and hindered further by the web's decimation of the notion of people paying for things.
Despite lofty expectations of journalistic intent, I'm a realist. I understand the conundrum. I know that journalism costs money and that it's expected to make money, and I realise that if people won't pay for that content – and they won't – newspaper companies will turn to an old ally that will: advertisers.
Local newspapers are crucial. They serve purposes no other media can or will – not the web, not national newspapers, not local television or radio. Their websites are fundamentally unusable and that’s a big issue.
These cesspits of pop-ups and pop-overs, invasive banners and nefarious placement, are nothing more than a toxic advertising assault, barely moderated and entirely destructive to any semblance of a user experience. If it were in newsprint you wouldn’t even wrap your chips in it.
That brings us on to the always delightful Reach plc. Reach probably owns your local newspaper website whether you know it or not, and therefore it’s vital. They own some national newspapers as well as two of the biggest city titles in the north-west and many, many others besides.
Reach is so large that it cannot be absolved of its culpability for the disgraceful standard of journalism. It’s as responsible for the supposed desires of its readership as it is straitjacketed by them.
At the start of November, Reach announced its third round of job cuts of 2023. It will be making 450 additional roles redundant, leaving 450 additional people without jobs. It’s expected that 320 of those will be editorial roles. There will be 320 fewer journalists and they’ll be replaced variously by artificial intelligence, mass producers of lowest common denominator social guff or – perhaps most dangerously of all – nothing.
Local football journalism will be hit hard as Reach’s latest consultation rumbles on and reaches its conclusion. Reach goes on while good professionals lose their jobs and they’re better than most of the click-hunting hacks who remain.
The football press is in the toilet precisely because the likes of Reach value eyeballs over brains and passive searchability over quality. There’s no excuse for it. The responsibility of these businesses extends beyond supply and demand. They’ve made choices every step of the way and each one of them has led to the deterioration of football journalism.
These titles with their laughable crippled websites and total lack of editorial integrity have made it impossible for good football writers and journalists to use their abilities to justify their jobs. Then they’ve asked them every day to justify their jobs. Option one: lower your standards. Option two: pack your shit.
Standards have certainly lowered. The online football media is a wasteland, all crylaugh emojis and raucous mirth over repeatedly shared moments of such tame comedic value that even Michael McIntyre would think twice about bothering with them.
Flaccid banter, club fanaticism and transfer rumours win out because they’re what people want. Not so long ago I used to think that wasn’t true, that it was an excuse peddled by cost-cutting capitalists and attention farmers. I thought the impetus came from the media and not from consumers.
Maybe that was the case, once. Now, given the weight of evidence of the last seven or eight years, I’m willing to concede that humans are basically morons. Give us an hilarious clip of a referee nearly falling over a little bit and we’ll forward it to our friends and family while you tear apart the fabric of civilisation uninterrupted.
Nevertheless, I remain convinced that there is still a place for the positive impact of football journalism. Though it’s long been in a perilous position because of the decline of print and the aforementioned shambles of the news media’s transition online, I had hoped that local coverage could continue to be that place.
The people I know who did or do cover specific teams for the local media are among the very best press people I know. They’re superior to so-called content creators because they are proper journalists. Their focus is news that’s actually news and, through their expertise and contacts, they deliver genuine insight into their beats. And they care about them.
For supporters of football clubs beyond those with global newsworthiness – and the abysmal standard of coverage they get is a whole other story – the local club reporter is an essential component in the football mechanism.
Many of these reporters also happen to be truly great writers and that, perhaps, is the greatest loss of all. I envy their ability to write and the idea that their employers don’t see the value in that because it doesn’t reel in the football’s cultural plankton doesn’t bear thinking about.
Reach has chosen to jettison these people in favour of a clickbait bin fire, third-hand videos and transfer stories known to be baseless at the point of publication. If our news media in England can publish a football line, publish it they will. Whether they should doesn’t even come into the conversation.
What’s most bizarre is that there are people inside and outside businesses like Reach that call this innovation. It’s not. It’s lazy and reactive.
More questionable still is that we’re constantly hearing more and more about the growth of data analysis in football. The game itself is heavily influenced by data, and the cleaning and crunching of those data represents genuine innovation in football journalism. If the local rag’s website isn’t the place for that level of spotlight and detail, maybe nowhere is.
The local football press needs journalists who get football, who understand what matters about it and what doesn’t. Supporting the team isn’t necessary but being able to generate a rapport with those who do should be considered an essential skill. That can’t be learned on the internet. Take those people away from the industry and football supporters are unavoidably short-changed.
When people on the inside talk to each other about football media they love to get into the nitty gritty.
They forensically examine why ads are placed where they’re placed, about which discussions should be had about this or that line. Is the headline right? Is the subeditor making the right decisions for any given story? What are we hearing from the club?
It’s molecular stuff because it’s in their nature and their training to pick over the bones of a story. They apply the same dissection to their own profession. It’s fascinating to observe their conversations about the football pages of local newspaper websites.
But the bottom line is that I, as a consumer rather than a producer of football reporting, will simply just not bother to read an article if the user experience puts me off it even for half a second. That’s how the web works.
People do not care enough about the substance to clamber through the chaff. Thinking we do is a mistake that I can only hope eventually proves fatal.
When it does, quality football coverage will still be standing somewhere above the rubble and the more independent it is, the more money the journalists make for themselves, the better it will be for us all.
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“But it bears repeating that at smaller clubs, the local beat reporters might be the only people turning up at every press conference and asking questions that supporters want answering. It may well be the case that the local newspaper model has its flaws, but many of those are a result of mismanagement at higher levels. Reach PLC losing this many people is a failure, not of the people who worked for them, but of the organisation itself.”
I turn to Ian King and Unexpected Delirium again this week and I make no apologies for that, given the relevance. I wholeheartedly recommend subscribing to (and paying for) Ian’s Substack. It’s worth it for the podcasts alone.
Salty beef extracts
Sutton cash in on promotion but fear prospect of relegation (The Observer)
The football fans who blocked VAR and Saudi money – and have the most exciting league in Europe (i)
How Exeter City became the Football League’s most important club (i)
Dessert
adidas. Retro. Originals. Collections. Mamma mia.
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