I’d say aside from Aaron Bower, the “big name” rugby league journalists are generally crap. They either plagiarise other peoples work or get their “facts” from these forums. League Express in particular has gone downhill and the likes of SARL do the sport more harm than good with their gobsheet.

we are at rock bottom for journalism in the UK generally, in RL it has been a sliding scale for decades.

The recent spats on twitter over copy just brings what has been happening out into the open.

I am ex-NUJ, it is just an old boys club these days.

I wouldn't be in a rush to credit any of them. Any decent investigative journalist would have a field day with the goings-on at the RFL in recent years but bar a few critical tweets there has been nothing of any substance, to my knowledge anyway.

Was just browsing some articles on the internet and was thinking how bloody awful most of it is. Decided to read some forums which I rarely do these days and lo and behold I’m not alone in thinking so. It seems to be all hearsay, speculation and rumour with no substance and poorly written too. Seems as with many aspects of our game there’s not sufficient money in it for anyone to actually bother putting any effort in.

The click bait on serious about rl is terrible, I've purposely stopped reading their stuff because it's a headline grab with no real content or interesting stuff behind it. And it's always regurgitated news articles that weve seen somewhere else first

Long gone are the days of Dave Hadfield, Andy Wilson and Chris Irvine.

Saw an interesting Twitter spat earlier this week, a League Express employee (Callum Walker) being accused of ripping off numerous articles and passing them off as his own.

Yeah that'd the serious about rl clickbait guy, Davidson and others hate him for ripping their stuff off and not even crediting them, and now he's been given a job at league express which is really REALLY poor judgement on sadlers part

Coverage of RL is minimal nowadays in the UK National Newspapers, unless there is some news that is in anyway negative towards the sport.

The sport used to get a reasonable allocation until the Northern Editions of various newspapers were discontinued and were moved to London.

There’s no money in it. It’s been a cycle of declining quality and ever less willingness to pay for it. Clubs have there own websites to announce news and interpretation is covered by forums and social media. The BBC and Sky provide adequate match reports. So it’s small niche and we’re conditioned now to expect rolling news and updates.

Being a RL journalist now must be a bit like being one of the last television repair men (or ‘person’, if they survived into modern times).

Yep! Barring a couple, RL journalists have seriously gone down hill in recent years. A few years ago I created a couple of silly transfer rumours which a couple of RL "journalists" published a few days later, with comments from sources if i remember rightly. I wanted to see if they really were in the know or if they just browsed the transfer speculation sections of forums, alas the point was proven.

Also, I don't like to make disparaging remarks about some ones competency at their own job (when they are almost certainly better than I would ever be at it), but I don't ever read anything by CW anymore, ever since he described himself as an "expert in Rugby League" when many people were correcting him on every article he authored.

That clown is the biggest culprit for fake news,complete tool.

My golden rule of RL journalism is...if every player is called a star then the article/magazine is junk.

I like 40/20 magazine. It's well written and engaging.

sadler was defending it on their forum last week

I saw that but being g banned I couldn't comment.