If you ever needed proof of the fact that sport is often seen as more important than life, death or just about anything, especially when viewed through the refractive lens of the mass media, it came with the events of Saturday, May 5, in Glasgow.
There were two major events attracting tens of thousands of people to the city that day, and as the only newspaper journalist to attend, participate in, report on and count the marchers, I can write with singular authority on the remarkable All Under One Banner march for independence. It was brilliant, and the police and stewards did a wonderful job – the only complaint was the lack of toilets at Glasgow Green.
There has been some hullabaloo about the press coverage of the event, but it seems everybody has missed the most glaring point of the coverage of the march in both the newspapers and electronic media – that the other big event of the day in Glasgow got vastly more column inches and airtime than the march which, need I remind you, was the biggest ever for independence in Scottish history.
Rangers v Kilmarnock at least had a properly counted attendance – 49,703 fans crammed into Ibrox and the majority of them went home happy.
Thanks in no small part to the previous day’s extraordinary signing of Steven Gerrard as the new manager, the Rangers v Kilmarnock tie gained vast coverage. The 1-0 victory was much reported, and Scotland’s newspapers devoted huge amounts of column inches to the match in comparison with the news reports of the march which had about 10,000 more people on it.
Am I upset about that? No, because newspapers are created from what their editors think their readers want. In the sports pages, that means the most important games of the day get the biggest prominence and in this country that usually means whichever game Celtic or Rangers are playing in.
That’s just a fact of life and the market we all trade in. But which of the two major events on Saturday, May 5, in Glasgow was the most important happening of the day? Don’t be silly, the march was possibly the most important event of the whole year for us as the only daily newspaper that supports independence. Yet we also gave plenty of column inches to the match and to the Gerrard story – indeed I wrote last week’s column about the same.
I like to think that as I have grown older, I have deduced the real order of importance in the things that make up my life, and while sport remains a vital part of my life, I am no longer a person who reads newspapers from the back to the front.
There’s another reason for that, too, and it’s down to the dwindling number of seriously good sports- writers in the UK. Most of the English sporting press are frankly dreadful, and many of the broadcasters and pundits who are mostly ex-professionals could do with elocution lessons for starters.
In Scotland we have lost so many big names in sports journalism that these days I can only think of a dozen sportswriters, whose every word I read, when it used to be 30 or so only 10 years ago. What annoys me is that very few people regularly break the “must-read” exclusives about managers and players.
There is a reason for that – the trade has changed and is very much driven by public relations people at clubs and sporting organisations deciding the agenda. Everybody is so image conscious that these PR people will quite regularly expel those who have criticised a chairman, a manager or a player.
So the “must-read” stories dwindle and so do the number of practitioners who deliver them.
We lost another one of the “must-reads” last week. Ron Scott of the Sunday Post was a big personality and one of the kindest men in our trade.
He broke more exclusives than most sportswriters these days could dream of. Ron at least enjoyed a few years of retirement, although he still attended some matches before his tragic death at the age of 70, and all I can say is that he will be much missed in the press boxes of this land.
Unlike me, Ron had little time for social media, and thought of the fans with smartphones as “pests”. I do follow some blogs and websites and find some very useful. But mainly they’re not written by journalists, and that’s why professional sportswriters are needed, even though I know many who are sickened regularly at being trolled.
I know several writers who have suffered extreme abuse for what they have written – my former colleague Graham Spiers above all. It’s always anonymous, of course, whereas we put our names to our views and reports. I invite all “pests” to do the same.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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