When Making a Murderer aired last year, highbrow news publications were quick to point out that it didn’t obey the tenets of investigative journalism.
At the same time, a slew of articles – starting with Kathryn Schulz’s op-ed piece in The New Yorker – were quick to point out that the online response to the show, especially the MaM subreddit, were a far cry from investigative journalism.
The elephant in the room was that none of these supposedly highbrow publications had managed to break Steven Avery’s story, nor had they been able to raise new theories or draw attention to new evidence as effectively as the online community.
While Reddit has been around since 2005, the furore surrounding MaM exposed a deep anxiety in the journalism community about the fact that some of the best investigative and analytical work is being conducted by non-professionals online.
When it comes to sport, that’s even clearer, since one of the great pleasures of sport is that you don’t have to be ‘qualified’ to talk about it analytically.
When it comes to NRL, it’s clearer still, since rugby league – at least in Australia – has traditionally been the province of the working class, just as rugby union has traditionally been the province of the professional class.
Of course, those distinctions don’t always hold. But it’s been my observation that professional people tend to gravitate towards rugby, AFL and even A-League before turning to NRL, for fear of how it might affect their status and self-image.
That doesn’t mean that NRL is completely working-class in its ethos, but that the conversations around NRL tend to exhibit a healthy working-class skepticism with authority and received opinion.
As a result, I’ve found that NRL fans are less likely to take the opinion of a columnist, commentator or coach for granted than rugby, AFL or A-League fans.
It makes sense, then, that the NRL subreddit has a bit of a different character from the rugby, AFL and A-League subreddits.
Whereas the latter tend to operate as news aggregators, the NRL subreddit is more about active, collective, robust analysis, with a bit of banter thrown in for good measure.
Of course, that’s not to say that analysis, expertise and discussion can’t be found on the rugby, AFL and A-League subreddits.
But the NRL subreddit is especially characterised by what might be described as a will to investigative journalism, resulting in some of the best footy analysis and discussion to be found anywhere on the web.
In part, that’s because there’s a depth of analysis that you just can’t reach in print media, or even in live commentary.
Reddit, on the other hand, has a number of structural features in place that make collective, mass analysis possible, while the NRL subreddit has a number of protocols, routines and traditions that make it peculiarly attuned to rigorous discussion.
At the same time, Reddit doesn’t have to maintain a readership as the tabloid media does, with the result that writers on the NRL subreddit can be more clinically analytical than your average columnist, but can also indulge in rhetorical flights of fancy and baroque banter that wouldn’t cut it in the world of mainstream journalism.
That stuff is real community-building and a testament to the communities that surround rugby league in Australia.
In the mainstream media, these communities often come off as unbearably insular: straight white guys who need a way to validate their masculinity. When every front page is devoted to Mitchell Pearce’s invocation of the ‘community’, it’s no wonder people get the wrong idea.
Online, however, there’s more room for variety. When I first used a gay dating service in my early 20s, I was amazed at the sheer diversity of people who identified as gay, very few of whom conformed to the stereotypes.
The same is true of the NRL subreddit. There are all kinds of people here, and an openness about gender, sexuality and mental health that exceeds every other subreddit I’ve encountered.
In a very real way, the laidback, laconic, laissez-faire spirit of NRL has here organically built a community that manages to be humorous, supportive and resilient at the same time.
In an era in which footy feels more and more co-opted by big business, it’s a warm reminder of the communities that still constellate around the game. Sure, they may be online but they’re still integral to the spirit of the NRL as a whole.
I’ve got a bit more to say about the NRL subreddit in future posts, since there are a lot of things that make it great. For the moment, check out if you haven’t already done so – you’ll be rewarded with some of the best footy analysis and banter to be found in any code.
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