If football journos were judged as footballers

Let me preface this piece by letting you all know that I was once a journalist. A sports journalist at that. And, while I might not have had a national readership like such luminaries as John Cross, the website I worked for did charge a monthly premium fee, people paid to read my content and I was paid a wage to produce that content. So, despite the disparity in readership, I was John Cross.

I’d also like to state for the record that I actually like John Cross. I don’t know him personally, but he seems a good bloke. I like seeing him on the Fans’ Forum. I often like his opinion pieces for the Mirror. And I like the fact that he’s on Twitter with the rest of us suffering Gooners and that he makes no bones about being a Gooner. So while he’s the focal point of this article, it’s not really about John Cross.

As we’re all aware, Robin van Persie is in the midst of contract negotiations with the club. How do we know this? Well, it’s all over the red tops. Ask any football journo and they’ll tell you that Arsene and Robin were locked in a survival-of-the-universe level stare-off this week. From the tenor of most of the breathless headlines, the talks were near catastrophic. Lets peruse some of these headlines, shall we?

From the Mirror on Thursday: “Outgunned? City lurk as Van Persie tells Arsenal he’s sick of being potless.”

From the Sun on Thursday: “RVP talks crisis – ROBIN VAN PERSIE’S Arsenal future hangs in the balance after showdown talks with boss Arsene Wenger.”

From ESPN on Thursday: “Initial Van Persie talks end in deadlock”

It’s all quite dramatic, isn’t it? Hair on fire, doomsday proclaiming stuff. I’m now less worried about the 2012 Mayan calendar than I am about Robin leaving.

But hang on a moment. From whence do these headlines come? What is the REAL genesis of such calamitous proclamations?

I’d like to direct you specifically to the Mirror article noted above. In this article, Mr Cross notes that Robin “made it plain that he is fed-up with not winning trophies.” Also, Robin has apparently “expressed his frustration to Arsenal and given a clear hint that he is ready to quit.”

Sound pretty dire, if you ask me.

But I’d like to point out that there is not a single quote in that article. Not one single attributable comment. And not one fact (save for the mentions of other teams being interested in Robin, which is hardly “news” at this point). Let me repeat that – without even so much as citing an unnamed source, John Cross speaks as the authority on all things Arsenal to ensure us that the above assertions are true without quoting anyone, making any kind of attribution or noting a specific fact that he can verify what actually took place during the meeting between Robin van Persie and Arsene Wenger. To be fair to John, he doesn’t write the headlines. But still, as a journalist, it’s at the very least disingenuous to “report” these things took place without backing them up in some way.

This brings me to the headline of my article – that we should start judging football journos as we judge footballers themselves. Heck, even as the journos often judge footballers.

Earlier today John Cross engaged several Arsenal supporters in a conversation on Twitter. He was receiving quite a bit of stick for his article and, as he often does, discussed the content with some disgruntled readers. True to form, John was generally pleasant in this conversation (and I commend him for this – he’s got shedloads more patience than I could muster), but one comment struck me as odd. He said that, as a journalist, he was no different from the milk delivery man who wants his company to make money from delivering a product. In John’s case, it’s delivering article content and the earnings come from newspaper sales or clicks on links. Fair enough comparison, I guess. But it got me thinking – what if we judged football journos as we judge footballers themselves? As supporters we pay a fee – ticket prices (at a minimum) – to see a product on the pitch, just as John produces article content.

When a footballer goes through a bad patch, we often hear “He’s not fit to wear the shirt!” or “What kind of wages is he on?!?” I’d like to see that judgment applied to football journos for producing content similar to that mentioned above. So, when John Cross writes an article that’s not an opinion piece, but is presented as “news”, and does so without backing up any assertions in the article, I want to hear screaming about his wages. I want protests demanding that he be relegated to a lower division Russian newspaper that’s more befitting his journalistic skills. I want him transferred to covering a team no one cares about, and that he should support that side until he starts producing better. We can then ease him back into the “starting rotation” of the Mirror – perhaps a whimsical Sunday piece about a new kit or some such piece, until he proves himself again and is worthy to cover The Arsenal.

Alas, I expect the Mayan calendar thing to come about before football journos are held to any sort of standard in reporting.