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Blind side johnny

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I don't know if the RFL have now relaxed or removed their regulation that required all clubs to produce a matchday programme but I have noticed that a number of clubs have now stopped providing them. Batley have a very good eProgramme (top job whoever produces that) and Huddersfield for one have said that they won't be producing paper programmes in 2020.

Does anyone know if we intend to continue with our own programme in 2020 or will we be following the trend and ceasing to do so?

For my ten-pennorth, I always buy a programme but don't keep them beyond the season's end. I believe that the quality of production and content has improved a lot in the past two years but also believe that the club consistently loses money by producing it. Hence I would find the loss of a programme to be regrettable but completely understandable. If we are stopping producing one though could we seriously look at producing an eProgramme such as Batley's or, failing that, have somebody keep the website data and information completely up to date on a weekly basis, at least, and preferably a daily one if possible?

Sport, amongst other things, is a dream-world offering escape from harsh reality and the disturbing prospect of change.

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  • 3 weeks later...

From the club web site:

Dewsbury Rams has taken the difficult decision not to continue the club’s match day programme Rampages.

This decision has not been taken lightly, and whilst the club recognizes that programmes have been a popular product down the years, unfortunately the publication did not deliver the profits needed to make it sustainable.

The club did look into various other programme ideas that could have been more cost effective, however these didn’t turn out to be the case.

Whilst this decision is not one we wanted to be taken it does open up the opportunity for the website to be used more. Therefor if anyone who has been contributing to the programme would like to contribute to the website with your article please don’t hesitate to get in touch by email media@dewsburyrams.co.uk

We hope that supporters understand this decision that has been taken and we hope everyone is looking forward to the 2020 season ahead.

We would like to thank All Design And Print for their many years of fantastic work, we thoroughly enjoyed working with them and would do again in the future.

However new for this season will be the sale and distribution of team sheets. These will be sold in the usual outlets around the ground, it will contain the actual team listings for the game on the front and on the back it will have each players photo and the name of their sponsors.

 

I hope that the club will continue to publish the team lineups on Twitter and Facebook in good time, maybe publishing the statutory 21 player squad before the actual game day.

Sport, amongst other things, is a dream-world offering escape from harsh reality and the disturbing prospect of change.

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Batley have not printed a programme for the last 12 moths instead you register with the club and you get a copy e.mailed to you at no cost.

Obviously it can't give you team news as it is usually sent out 24/48 hours before the match.

Get a few frustrated away supporters who try to buy programmes.

 

 

1950s Gallant Youth, 2000 Bulldog

 

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Hopefully something will replace the programme and if it does then I think the essential elements should be the following:

Chairman's comments - the club is often criticised for it's lack of communication, yet Mark's column was often frank, open and would hint at future developments.

Coach's comments - likewise, with a coach being forced to write a few words every week they would be forced to reveal a bit of their personality. Even Warren Jowett did it.

Statistics - probably the most important of all is the spreadsheet which said who played where against who and scored what. Those pages settled many a post-match debate in the Royal Suite. I'm not a huge statto who wants to know how many yards a player ran or how many farts they did in the dressing room, but I like to follow who the top try scorers and goalkickers are, and who has made the most appearances. Please, powers that be, can you make this information available to the fans this season as it wasn't available anywhere else except the programme.

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7 hours ago, creditwhereitsdews said:

Hopefully something will replace the programme and if it does then I think the essential elements should be the following:

Chairman's comments - the club is often criticised for it's lack of communication, yet Mark's column was often frank, open and would hint at future developments.

Coach's comments - likewise, with a coach being forced to write a few words every week they would be forced to reveal a bit of their personality. Even Warren Jowett did it.

Statistics - probably the most important of all is the spreadsheet which said who played where against who and scored what. Those pages settled many a post-match debate in the Royal Suite. I'm not a huge statto who wants to know how many yards a player ran or how many farts they did in the dressing room, but I like to follow who the top try scorers and goalkickers are, and who has made the most appearances. Please, powers that be, can you make this information available to the fans this season as it wasn't available anywhere else except the programme.

You need a Roger T in your fan base.... get one of your semi literate pensioners to put one up on the forum

Touch Rugby W(h)inger and part-time Super Hero (Thursday mornings by appointment) :superman:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BATLEY BULLDOGS RLFC :bb:

 

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9 hours ago, Piggy's mate said:

You need a Roger T in your fan base.... get one of your semi literate pensioners to put one up on the forum

That disqualifies me then.

?

Sport, amongst other things, is a dream-world offering escape from harsh reality and the disturbing prospect of change.

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Some interesting posts on the TotalRL Collectors' Forum with a couple of people saying they are boycotting Dewsbury and Batley this season because they won't be producing programmes. Anoraks maybe, but a lot of sports fans are.

Also interesting to note how 'amateur' clubs like Normanton, Thornhill, Dewsbury Moor and even Sherwood Wolf Hunt (!) manage to produce programmes on far smaller crowds and budgets.

Hope the club can reconsider its decision.

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Have to admit buying a programme has been integral to my match day experience since first attending sport (rugby league and others) in the early Seventies. 

Much as I like collecting programmes, I'm afraid only too clearly they are going the way of all printed matter - into history. When the big clubs in various sports (even Super League and the Football League) opt to ditch them, the writing (as it were) is on the wall. There's a certain irony here because, in terms of design, print and paper quality (if not always content), programmes have never been better. 

For many years now, I haven't supported a particular rugby league team. Most weekends, I simply pick a game I fancy. Been a regular visitor to Dewsbury over the years. The club's programme has always been one of the better lower division issues. 

Be good to know the exact costs, including advertising and sales revenue, of programme production. As stated above, National Conference League clubs manage to produce match programmes - many of them quietly impressive - on relatively limited resources. Most are included with admission.

In non-league football, even very small clubs - right down to step seven - issue programmes. Several design-and-print enterprises (similar to Simon Hall's, who has been doing Dewsbury's programme) have sprung up to service this market. Examples include Footie Print, JMA Programmes, Matchday Creative and Matchday Programmes, which put together programmes for football clubs with far, far smaller crowds, and fewer resources, than Dewsbury RLFC. Check out the @NonLgeProgs Twitter feed.

Interestingly, rugby union appears mostly immune to the trend for ditching printed programmes. Often, rugby union clubs include their programmes with admission. The model is generally a static 'shell' with a match-specific insert. Must keep costs down!

Digital programmes, though better than nothing, don't really do it for me. It's the road Batley (and Hull KR and Leigh) have gone down. I haven't attended games at any of those clubs since they abandoned printed programmes. With regret, I'll be adding Dewsbury to my list. Soz.

Wasn't aware Huddersfield had decided to abandon printed programmes (see OP), though I know Fartown's came in for a bit of flak last season because it was £3 and deemed to contain very little of interest. [I note Huddersfield's website content still includes talk of a 2020 programme. They claim to sell 2,000 a game]

Leigh's thick, glossy programme (now produced only digitally), one of the best in the league, full of original features not available elsewhere, was viable, I gather, only at Super League level. In the Championship, sales drop to around 400 a game. There's a school of thought suggesting if printed programmes are interesting enough, people will still buy them. Unfortunately, Leigh's experience indicates otherwise.

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13 hours ago, creditwhereitsdews said:

Some interesting posts on the TotalRL Collectors' Forum with a couple of people saying they are boycotting Dewsbury and Batley this season because they won't be producing programmes. Anoraks maybe, but a lot of sports fans are.

Also interesting to note how 'amateur' clubs like Normanton, Thornhill, Dewsbury Moor and even Sherwood Wolf Hunt (!) manage to produce programmes on far smaller crowds and budgets.

Hope the club can reconsider its decision.

So they didn't go to Batley last season then? This will account for their gates plumetting. The simple reason behind the clubs' decisions is that insufficient people were buying programmes in the first instance to get anywhere near viability.

If you take the situation back to fundamentals, removing habitual behaviour and seeming long-standing traditions, and ask what is the function of a matchday programme, I believe that you would say that all of them are now obsolete. Current means of communication allow for all of the information that you would want from a programme to be readily and more easily provided elsewhere. I am speaking as a regular programme buyer, but also one who has disposed of the majority of them pretty quickly afterwards.

Sport, amongst other things, is a dream-world offering escape from harsh reality and the disturbing prospect of change.

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2 hours ago, Blind side johnny said:

So they didn't go to Batley last season then? This will account for their gates plumetting. The simple reason behind the clubs' decisions is that insufficient people were buying programmes in the first instance to get anywhere near viability.

If you take the situation back to fundamentals, removing habitual behaviour and seeming long-standing traditions, and ask what is the function of a matchday programme, I believe that you would say that all of them are now obsolete. Current means of communication allow for all of the information that you would want from a programme to be readily and more easily provided elsewhere. I am speaking as a regular programme buyer, but also one who has disposed of the majority of them pretty quickly afterwards.

I used to buy programs. I still keep a few from the seventies and eighties  in a drawer, which I occasionally wheel out just to remind me what my last replica shirt looked like. They are tatty, covered in beer stains and tomato sauce, and the team sheets have scratched out names alongside the relevant team changes, which means they are hardly collectors items, BUT I can't bring myself to bin them. Back in those cold winters days, they gave you something to read at half time (between swigs from the hip flask), and often, along with the Reporter, were the main source of club news. I suppose in the current climate of twitter, facebook and rugby forums, programs have become something of an irrelevance, but maybe clubs should remember that not everybody is online, and the provision of a team sheet for anybody asking for one should be mandatory for all clubs, even if they have to levy a small charge to cover the costs.  Sobering thought that when I bought those seventies programs, you still had to go to Spain if you wanted a pint of San Miguel. :kolobok_grin:

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

 

George Bernard Shaw.

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48 minutes ago, grumpyoldram said:

I used to buy programs. I still keep a few from the seventies and eighties  in a drawer, which I occasionally wheel out just to remind me what my last replica shirt looked like. They are tatty, covered in beer stains and tomato sauce, and the team sheets have scratched out names alongside the relevant team changes, which means they are hardly collectors items, BUT I can't bring myself to bin them. Back in those cold winters days, they gave you something to read at half time (between swigs from the hip flask), and often, along with the Reporter, were the main source of club news. I suppose in the current climate of twitter, facebook and rugby forums, programs have become something of an irrelevance, but maybe clubs should remember that not everybody is online, and the provision of a team sheet for anybody asking for one should be mandatory for all clubs, even if they have to levy a small charge to cover the costs.  Sobering thought that when I bought those seventies programs, you still had to go to Spain if you wanted a pint of San Miguel. :kolobok_grin:

Aye, but beer was so much better then wasn't it Grumpy that you didn't need to drink lager at all?

Sport, amongst other things, is a dream-world offering escape from harsh reality and the disturbing prospect of change.

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On 17/01/2020 at 13:45, Blind side johnny said:

From the club web site:

Dewsbury Rams has taken the difficult decision not to continue the club’s match day programme Rampages.

This decision has not been taken lightly, and whilst the club recognizes that programmes have been a popular product down the years, unfortunately the publication did not deliver the profits needed to make it sustainable.

The club did look into various other programme ideas that could have been more cost effective, however these didn’t turn out to be the case.

Whilst this decision is not one we wanted to be taken it does open up the opportunity for the website to be used more. Therefor if anyone who has been contributing to the programme would like to contribute to the website with your article please don’t hesitate to get in touch by email media@dewsburyrams.co.uk

We hope that supporters understand this decision that has been taken and we hope everyone is looking forward to the 2020 season ahead.

We would like to thank All Design And Print for their many years of fantastic work, we thoroughly enjoyed working with them and would do again in the future.

However new for this season will be the sale and distribution of team sheets. These will be sold in the usual outlets around the ground, it will contain the actual team listings for the game on the front and on the back it will have each players photo and the name of their sponsors.

 

I hope that the club will continue to publish the team lineups on Twitter and Facebook in good time, maybe publishing the statutory 21 player squad before the actual game day.

Selling team sheets! ?

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