Their success seems to be based on “capturing an audience” which can be done without spending a fortune on TV rights, through running discussions and debates which avoid the standard view churned out daily by the print media and some broadcasters.
This unified “mainstream” view, which we can most certainly see in the UK’s newspaper and broadcaster-owned football websites, occurs because of the habit of journalists and publishers looking at each other’s output and making sure they haven’t missed a key story and are not stepping out of line with the majority. If today’s story is “Arsenal are slipping” then everyone runs that, even if the evidence is a single poor result.
Which is ok until the majority lose track of what their viewers and readers are actually thinking or are interested in. Except that because of the limited number of broadcasters of football in the UK, the approach to the game by each reporter is invariably similar. Experts pop up on different channels always spouting the same views, always highlighting the same topics.
Of course, readers and viewers can rebel, but it takes some nerve to say that virtually all the media is getting it wrong.
However, as the reporting and commenting on football becomes ever more fragmented, so other views do come to be expressed, and the media finds itself out of touch with its audience.
The most obvious example comes with sudden “dips” (a subject we have often commented upon), wherein a winning team suddenly, unexpectedly, gets a series of maybe three or four matches where draws and defeats replace the wins. The media, which insists that only yesterday’s game is news, finds itself stuck for a good explanation.
That’s a tiny example of course, but even that was not mentioned at first, as bloggers felt that to gain credibility, they had to copy broadcasters. Now, however, we are at last getting the view that just because a broadcaster explains the cause of a club’s downturn through (for example) the need to replace the centre forward, that doesn’t mean that is actually true.
As a result, slowly, very slowly, broadcasters and newspaper journalists with their instant “analysis” which is nothing more than yesterday’s opinion slightly re-written, realise they are finding themselves out of line with their viewers and readerships. It’s a long slow process, and it has only just begun, but maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.