Kevin McKenna and the media revolution

As I have already written, the decision by Celtic to invite fan media to a presser with the new manager and CEO has triggered some of the Stenography Corps.

That is why this piece by Kevin McKenna in the Celtic Way is worth your time today.

As often with his writing, the first par draws you in:

“Scotland’s mainstream football writers have never hidden their contempt for the blogging community. They consider the men and women who create content for fan websites as uncouth amateurs who ought to be kept at a considerable distance from the professionals as they chisel out their golden prose.”

Full disclosure I know and like the man.

He’s avuncular, approachable, and consistently calls it as he sees it.

Before we were acquainted, he was the only person in the mainstream media in Scotland to write a review of my book Downfall.

You can read it here.

Dear reader, we are all living through a communications revolution that future historians may conclude will relegate the invention of the printing press to a footnote in the story of human development.

I’m a digital immigrant.

I was in my thirties before I had a word processor and in my forties before I experienced the internet.

Consequently, the media that I consumed and was Second Wave output top down.

My first forays into journalism as a content creator (a term that probably didn’t exist then) was within that industrial paradigm.

Now all of my written work, news stories, and commentary appear here.

Unwittingly I became part of Toffler’s vision of the “de-massified media”.

As a media consumer about my club, it is an atypical day that I miss the ACSOM bulletin.

At the start of last season, the quite excellent Celtic By Numbers told me that the Hoops were heading for hard times against a much improved Sevco.

I think that it is fair to say that these evidence-based concerns were totally vindicated.

For the avoidance of doubt, at the same time, many of the chaps on the sports desks were hoping at the Ten could be stopped somehow.

However, the educated data journalists on fan media told me WHY it would happen with their data-led approach.

Until recently, I was a member of the NUJ’s New Media Industrial Council (NMIC).

For over a decade, I  was part of a collective that provided policy proposals for our National Executive Committee on how the digital revolution impacted the working lives of our members.

Toffler wrote The Third Wave in 1980 as the word processing revolution was getting underway.

On Planet Football, it produced the fanzine movement.

Now YouTube has spawned a new Podcast media.

Unlike the anonymous viciousness of football message boards, these content creators are out there in their own names.

I believe Kevin is essentially correct to state that this revolution will not do walking away.

The content that the mainstream offer up does not compare well with the best of fan media.

I still pay for journalism from Fair Caledonia with subscriptions to the Herald and the National.

However, as I was putting this piece together, I realised that I hardly ever look at their sports coverage.

Apart from the generally low standard of writing, one of the reasons is that they almost without exception collude with the Orwellian lie that Rangers  (1872) did not die in 2012.

Even when the truth appeared on the front pages of their own titles, they quickly fell into line with the commercially important fantasy that Sevco was Rangers.

This site was unequivocal throughout 2011 about the impending financial storm that would do for Rangers before the end of season 2011-2012.

During that time, some of the Stenopgpahy Corps indulged in sniggers and sneers about a fantasist in Donegal.

The fact that I was a member of the NUJ putting his own name out there didn’t seem to matter.

They didn’t like message.

The very idea that Rangers could go bust was t enough to produce dignified guffaws in the press box.

Ah well…

Now the new Ibrox club will charge the mainstream £25,000 for access.

What the Stenography Corps SHOULD do is look into the cash situation at Ibrox.

However, if they did that, they would be doing journalism on the inhabitants of the Blue Room, and that just wouldn’t do.

A good journalist should always hold power to account, including the dominant narrative within the mainstream media.

That is what Kevin has done today.

That’s one of the reasons that he’s a good journalist.

He finished his piece with a stark prediction that may, in time, be fully vindicated by events:

“Soon, the bloggers will be considered the mainstream with the old print journalists pushed to the margins. Rather than dismiss them as untutored interlopers the mainstream sector should start learning from them. Their own survival might come to depend on how willing they are to do this.”