11th February 2001
Column Inches
(Stuart Crowther)

PEOPLE MIGHT NOT REALISE IT, but the annual battle for supremacy in Scottish Football is not simply fought out between the participating clubs.  There is another battle going on, every bit as mean and bloody - in fact, much more so.  This is the battle for media supremacy, the fight to see who gets in there first with the latest 'exclusive'!

As fans, we hate them all of course.  The Keevins and such of the media world who appear to snarl and sneer their way through the column inches, sometimes accused of being patronising towards the likes of Hibernian while at others being accused of simply ignoring anyone outside the Old Firm.  Theirs is a world where the slightest rumour becomes an exclusive fact; a world where the innocent throw-away uttering of the professional football player or manager becomes a sensational headline.

Yes, we hate them don't we.  And yet, we still buy the papers, we still hang on their every word - and we still believe them when they tell us that Rangers or Celtic are interested in some over-paid foreign superstar that nobody in this small nation of ours has ever actually heard of anyway!  And before anyone points this out, I'm well aware of the fact that the 'new media' - web sites such as Hibs.Net itself - are fast becoming very much a part of this culture, indeed to a large extent we depend on the culture to feed information to our own hungry army of fans.

"Yes, we hate them don't we.  And yet, we still buy the papers, we still hang on their every word..."

The media war is fought out largely by the tabloids, and in Scotland the constant sniping between the Daily Record and the Sun is amusing to most readers.  They strive to claim to be first with the news, and to be fair quite often they are.  There is a remarkable skill in the journalists who work for these papers, an ability that is every bit as skillful as the footballers themselves.  Sure, much of it is guesswork, and while they boast of their 'we told you so' successes they don't often brandish their majority 'we got it wrong' failures.

We profess to hate them, but truth is we need them because for the most part if it were left to the PR men at our clubs, in the SPL in particular, we would never learn anything of real interest!  One wonders though at what point the sports media will start to recognise the danger to their cosy little world that is creeping up from the wings.  As they attack each other in print on a daily basis, 'new media' internet sites are breaking the real stories without fuss and with little fanfare, and invariably ahead of the printed press.

The relationship between press and 'Fans' media has been a friendly one up until now.  The Fanzine culture from the 1980's was not seen as a threat by the mainstream media, and in fact many a journalist cut his first pencil point in the Fanzine world.  The days though of the 'cut-n-paste' football fanzine appears to have been replaced by the more slick internet presence.  A look around the Rivals.Net network demonstrates that point more than any words can, as this collection of individual club sites run by fans may vary in quantity, but the underlying factor through most of them is that they ooze quality.

Many mainstream journalists are now confessing to using these sites more and more as sources of information to inform their own work.  Others however choose to ignore the 'new media', there has after all been newspapers for hundreds of years and there will be for hundreds more, they see themselves as untouchable and this latest threat well - they are amateurs, fans - what do they know about the game?  No threat.  For those in the 'new media' business, that is perhaps the biggest advantage of all, to be seen as no threat.  

As 'new' football clubs such as Livingston rise towards the SPL and are not seen as a threat, one day it is not difficult to envisage them breaking up the cozy old-boys network.  Likewise with the new media, they are creeping up there and the traditional journalists might do well to start glancing over their shoulders a bit more, because times are changing and the fans with pens are learning the game faster than you might have expected!