- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
One of the weekend’s most important football stories was written not by a dedicated football journalist, but by a long-serving reporter and editor at online Fairfax website Brisbane Times.
Cameron Atfield is a veteran journalist and knowledgeable football fan, and his piece entitled “Match-fixing fears as Malaysian team joins Queensland football league” highlighted the potential for corruption when the Malaysian under-22 national team joins the new National Premier Leagues Queensland competition.
It was an important story, but one unlikely to have attracted the sort of attention it deserves.
Anyone who has spent time around Asian football knows full well the influence of Asian-based betting syndicates.
Over the years I’ve been asked by more than one outlet to use my extensive knowledge of Japanese football to write publicly-available match previews for the Asian betting market.
I’m far from the only journo to have been asked – even the great Jonathan Wilson writes regular blogs for betting agencies.
So why would a professionally trained journalist spend their time writing for betting agencies?
Because there is no longer enough paid work in print journalism to make a living.
It’s not the first time I’ve suggested as much, but I felt it timely to reiterate the point given the rumours that Mike Cockerill has reputedly left his position as Associate Editor of Football Federation Australia’s website.
Cockerill is, in my opinion, the best print football journalist in Australia.
He joined footballaustralia.com.au at a time when I was writing a freelance column for the site focused predominantly on Brisbane Roar, with the occasional foray into how Australia was faring in Asian football.
But when the website’s digital contract with Optus expired, myself and a few other contractors were told our services were no longer required.
There were no hard feelings from my end – columns come and columns go – but I raised an eyebrow at some of the names who replaced us.
The new columnists were, almost exclusively, former players.
That should come as no real surprise in a country where sports stars hold huge sway and a ‘jobs for the boys’ mentality has long reigned, but what does it say for the future of Australian journalists?
If they’re anything like me they’ve got a $40,000 HECS debt and a mortgage to pay, while plenty of ex-pros have no such journalism training but plenty of cash.
And the problem with relying on a network of ex-players to comment on the game is one of neutrality.
Indeed, when footballaustralia.com.au started running editorial content, critics complained that the game’s governing body couldn’t be trusted to run unbiased reports.
But how many of those critics were willing to put hands into their pockets and actually pay for quality journalism?
Everybody wants New York Times-quality investigative reports, but nobody is willing to pay for it.
In the past few years magazines like Australian Football Weekly, Soccer International and Football+ have all gone to the wall.
They’ve largely been replaced by online blogs and websites, many of which do an outstanding job of plugging the gaps left by the mainstream football media.
But how many of those who spend hours writing for these sites are actually getting paid?
Meanwhile, print media is in its death throes.
That’s probably why newspaper journalists, whose work is now read almost exclusively on the internet, spend much of their time pejoratively calling anyone writing online “new media” as some kind of attempted put-down.
The irony is that this humble little column on an independent website has now registered more than a million article reads.
Trying to transpose old-world, long-form journalism onto websites simply doesn’t work.
And where once we might have asked where the next Hall of Fame journalist like Cockerill would come from, now we might reasonably ponder whether any such journalist can exist at all.
You get the journalism you’re willing to pay for, and right now, no one is willing to pay.