You can please some of the people some of the time

4:52pm Monday 26th February 2007

By Blake Richardson

Allow me to regale you with a story of an incident that happened a long time ago (well, 1997), in a city far, far away (Salisbury) when I was cutting my teeth in sports journalism.

Which side of the fence would you football fans have been sitting on the day the following argument raged?

The manager of Salisbury at the time was Geoff Butler, a former Chelsea and Norwich full back, who had just guided the Southern League side to the fourth qualifying-round of the FA Cup, where they were comprehensively beaten 4-0 by fellow non-leaguers King's Lynn.

In the intro of my match report, published in the following Thursday's paper (the Salisbury Journal is a weekly rag), I included the word "debacle", which I thought an apt choice of word to sum up the team's capitulation.

An irate Butler called me into his office that same morning and gave me the full hairdryer treatment.
In a nutshell, what he was saying was the local paper had a responsibility to the club to refrain from critical comment.

I argued that football was a game of opinions, and criticism, when based on hard evidence, was an instrumental part of the job, in the same way as praise and acclaim are.

At the T&A, the sports desk prides itself on fair and accurate reporting but inevitably we get City and Bulls fans writing in saying that we are being over-critical of the team, and just as many claiming we are under-critical.

More often than not, regional sports writers have just one team to report on, unlike their national counterparts, who can afford to upset one club with a negative tale and then move on to another for a story.

Reader-grabbing headlines is one thing, but we steer clear of the nationals' affinity for deliberately exaggerating and sensationalising stories to fuel controversy.

If we are too critical we risk losing the ear of the chairman, manager or players. We may even be banned from training or the press box on match days (as has been the case with several regional Yorkshire newspapers in recent times!), which could have a direct effect on newspaper sales.

So while we try and reflect the frustration of the fans we cannot afford to be as brazen as they are in the reader comments on the website or in the letters section of the T&A.

But while a more coy approach is sometimes required, it is often easy to read between the lines.
On the other side of the coin, some fans get riled by a perceived reluctance to criticise.

I can sympathise with this but fans must understand that journalists are caught between a rock and a hard place.

They are perched on the tightrope of objectivity, where balance is all-important. Too soft on the club and we risk upsetting the fans, too critical and we upset the club.

It can be all too easy for a reporter to censor his or her remarks to protect sources, safeguard against reprisals from die-hard fans or simply to ensure an easier ride for themselves when they go along to interview players after training.

As sports editor it is my job to ensure that we strike the right balance.

When Colin Todd was in the final few weeks of his tenure, it was our job to inform and stimulate debate through factual reporting. We published views from Todd, the chairman and the fans and mixed it up with our own objective match reports. After reading every side of the story, the fans could then make up their own minds if they were backing or attacking the manager.

Any criticism we do dish out must be well-informed and based on facts, and the T&A is lucky that, in City reporter Simon Parker and Bulls reporter Dave Craven, we have two of the most knowledgeable writers in their field in the whole of the regional press.

However, you can never please all of the people all of the time. I guess sports journalists must just learn to come to terms with that fact.