It's Only a man In a Suit!

[Oxford]

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/men-suits-continue-dominate-rugby-20089300?utm_source=leeds_live_newsletter&utm_campaign=rugby_league_lve_newsletter&utm_medium=email

This is a really good piece by Matthew Shaw, where he highlights the fact that the real stars have been pushed out of the limelight by the actions of "Men in suits" or Chairmen.

I agree with this point but feel if Journos hadn't made this the headlines afterwards it might have helped steer around this and focussed on the players and issues for teams in 2021.

I'm not trying to point the finger at Journalists or Chairmen but find myself asking "If our stars don't get a look in as news are we silly to be surprised by the game's lack of progress in media terms?"

[Hela Wigmen]

It’s been over 100 days since the Super League Grand Final. We’ve had no International games. We’ve had no pre-season Friendlies yet. We’ve had very little to talk about aside from the inevitable Covid related stuff and the financial impact this pandemic and the subsequent restrictions have on the sport as we head into a year where we are renegotiating a TV deal. Why is he shocked or surprised that these people are taking precedence at this time?

[hindle xiii]

I thought this was about Ronnie the Rhino.

[RigbyLuger]

Journalist complains about journalism.

 

Won't be any future stories about those men in suits then. Good to hear! 

[M j M]

It is weird that Wigan put their chairman on first for an hour at the start of their squad media day.

[Angelic Cynic]

Matthew Shaw is becoming the stand out journalist.

Getting better since his recent move into what he is currently doing.

On the cusp of the new playing season,this very Weekend and it has been overshadowed by immaturity and ignorance on a par with southern based tv 'personalities'.

 

 

 

[Whippet13]

 

1 hour ago, M j M said:

It is weird that Wigan put their chairman on first for an hour at the start of their squad media day.

Ian Lenagan decided to put himself on first and came out with some pretty strange stuff in that interview, all he did was further emphasise the disorganised and very divided mess that SL governance is in.

[whatmichaelsays]

14 hours ago, Oxford said:

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/men-suits-continue-dominate-rugby-20089300?utm_source=leeds_live_newsletter&utm_campaign=rugby_league_lve_newsletter&utm_medium=email

This is a really good piece by Matthew Shaw, where he highlights the fact that the real stars have been pushed out of the limelight by the actions of "Men in suits" or Chairmen.

I agree with this point but feel if Journos hadn't made this the headlines afterwards it might have helped steer around this and focussed on the players and issues for teams in 2021.

I'm not trying to point the finger at Journalists or Chairmen but find myself asking "If our stars don't get a look in as news are we silly to be surprised by the game's lack of progress in media terms?"

Blaming the journalists here is pointing the finger in the wrong place. 

Journalists will report what they see and find. The sport and the clubs employ PR and media relations staff who are literally paid to encourage journalists to see and find the right things. 

So if the players aren't getting the limelight, we need to ask why. Are the clubs building stories around the players? Are the players being media trained so that they're comfortable with the media and able to speak in a language other than cliche? Are the clubs making the players available to the media (I know this is a long-standing complaint from people at Sky)? Do the clubs trust their players when it comes to areas like social media? The clubs literally pay staff to make all of that happen.

As @MJMpoints out, if Wigan are putting the "men in suits" front-and-centre of their club media day, you can't blame the journalists for reporting on the men in suits - they're seeing and reporting on exactly what Wigan want the journalists to find and report on. Why wasn't the first hour dedicated to the team captain, the new signings or the Head Coach? 

[Oxford]

4 hours ago, whatmichaelsays said:

Blaming the journalists here is pointing the finger in the wrong place. 

If you read the article you'll see that the writer makes the same point that the people he didn't want making the news were dominant.  He said journalists were duty bound to follow that as the story. Now if you agree with this point that's fine but journalists are capable of making decisions & thinking outside the box. Beyond that: Are fans more interested in the pontifications of chairmen or the way their team is shaping up for the new season? & Which would you rather read about?

In any case I wonder how more interested we might have been if one journalist had stood out from the crowd over this.

And I said I wasn't having a go at either group and I agreed with him. You say it's Wigan's fault if they allow the chairman to dominate but, well, er isn't he in charge of things there ?

 

[whatmichaelsays]

17 minutes ago, Oxford said:

If you read the article you'll see that the writer makes the same point that the people he didn't want making the news were dominant.  He said journalists were duty bound to follow that as the story. Now if you agree with this point that's fine but journalists are capable of making decisions & thinking outside the box. Beyond that: Are fans more interested in the pontifications of chairmen or the way their team is shaping up for the new season? & Which would you rather read about?

In any case I wonder how more interested we might have been if one journalist had stood out from the crowd over this.

And I said I wasn't having a go at either group and I agreed with him. You say it's Wigan's fault if they allow the chairman to dominate but, well, er isn't he in charge of things there ?

 

You're right that journalists are free to "think outside the box" but, at the same time, the era of click-chasing, social media retweet-following and article quota-hitting journalism, reporters are going to go for the "low hanging fruit" as it were. The latest round of "which chairman wants to get his backside spanked by Hetherington" does, annoyingly, get clicks and creates forum discussion. Equally, poor media training means that interviews with players tend not to be that interesting or insightful - largely because most players seem incapable of saying (or aren't allowed to say) much beyond "yeah mate.... err..... the boys....err..... doing it tough......big game next week.......good D in the middle.......".  

RL is in a particuarly tight spot as there is a diminishing number of dedicated RL hacks across the media. Matt Shaw is one of the better hacks around but he himself seems to be heading up something of a pooled resource at Reach, which might mean fewer RL hacks generally into the future. With less people to talk about RL, less people and less time to research stories and more content mediums to fill, there is something of a need for clubs to do the journalists' jobs for them to a degree. In any segment of PR, the more you do the journalist, the more likely you are to get that coverage. If you don't do their job, they're going to write about what is easy and what is going to get the reaction. 

And it's in the clubs' interests for them to do that. They get to control the narrative, they get to build better relationships with the media (both inside and outside RL circles) and the reach of their stories go further - all of that has commercial benefit. Instead, what we tend to find now is that a lot of the content that the clubs do produce is kept on their own channels, essentially restricting its reach to the existing fan base. 

I've got no idea why Lenagan decided to take centre stage at the club media day to launch an ad hominem attack on Gary Hetherington, but to point the finger at the RL press for picking it up is missing the point. Lenagan is free to hold opinions on Hetherington, as childish or uninformed as they might be, but if I were Wigan's media manager, I'd have been strongly reminding him of what the event was supposed to be about. If he carried on, I'd have what is known in the trade as a "dead cat" on hand to try and distract the press from Lenagan making an idiot of himself.  

[M j M]

36 minutes ago, Oxford said:

If you read the article you'll see that the writer makes the same point that the people he didn't want making the news were dominant.  He said journalists were duty bound to follow that as the story. Now if you agree with this point that's fine but journalists are capable of making decisions & thinking outside the box. Beyond that: Are fans more interested in the pontifications of chairmen or the way their team is shaping up for the new season? & Which would you rather read about?

In any case I wonder how more interested we might have been if one journalist had stood out from the crowd over this.

And I said I wasn't having a go at either group and I agreed with him. You say it's Wigan's fault if they allow the chairman to dominate but, well, er isn't he in charge of things there ?

 

No. Let's be serious here. If the chairman of the second biggest club in the league comes out for an hour and pontificates widely on matters relating to the game, including some pretty fundamental issues to the sport's future and also including taking an embarrassing swipe at the chief exec of the largest club, the distracting media coverage which follows is the fault of the person making the news not those who report it.

[Oxford]

On 12/03/2021 at 15:17, whatmichaelsays said:

reporters are going to go for the "low hanging fruit" as it were.

And there's the problem.

 

On 12/03/2021 at 15:18, M j M said:

Let's be serious here. If the chairman of the second biggest club in the league comes out for an hour and pontificates widely on matters relating to the game, including some pretty fundamental issues to the sport's future and also including taking an embarrassing swipe at the chief exec of the largest club, the distracting media coverage which follows is the fault of the person making the news not those who report it.

I agree let's be serious chairmen are on the whole in love with their club and lose sight of the game as a whole which is clearly  a recipe for remaining small and going nowhere!