The sport is terribly run. The lack of media support is the fault of the RFL.

Could anyone blame Sky for pulling out completely or dropping their fee? They could halve it, genuinely, and still not have competition for the coverage.

Other that courting some sort of controversy or scandal for the sensation seeking editors there isn't a lot the RFL can do about it.

We have two major trophy finals and they most probably will be well reported, but weekly matches have to struggle for column inches against the god of football.

RU gets good coverage during the six nations, then disappears, similarly it seems to be only International Cricket that gets any coverage.

Athletics will get coverage in an Olympic year and when the world championships are on and again it is only title fights in boxing that attract any attention.

The ownership of the Times and its coverage of rugby league are disconnected. The fact is, the broadsheets cover football, rugby union and cricket and everything else gets fleeting coverage and the red tops cover football and everything else gets fleeting coverage

The print media is probably the closest refection of the demographic makeup of this country and always has been. If you want a good description, search for 'Jim hacker newspapers' on a search engine - it is as true today as it was then

I stopped buying newspapers several years ago due to their lack of rugby league coverage. I sent a letter to the editor of The Mirror, whose office replied with a generic '[ican't please everyone[/i' response.
I was warned about this reduction in column inches by one of the journalists mentioned in the piece a whuile ago. He made it clear that plenty of other sports were in the same boat and that even cricket and rugby union, supposedly mainstream and national sports, were struggling to get more than a page in many of the national newspapers.

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn,t there a statement last year from the RFL that the Daily Mirror was to be the media *voice" for rugby league.

I blame all the dedicated media personnel at the pro clubs, especially the SL clubs, for this problem!!!

Or perhaps there aren't any

this reporter is only saying what some of us have been saying for ages.
SL/SLE or what ever its called is treading water off the field.

is it a coincidence that the other three main team sports in england are all london based and are doing so well off the field.

perhaps its now time for SL/SLE to re-locate to the capital were the media are based.

The only chance our sport has off the field now is one of the weekly rugby league newspapers becoming a daily newspaper with all your usual trash (Page 3, Katie Price Column etc) in. For example lets make The League Express like the sun (just an example - lots in this country read it) but with rugby league as its main sport.

Of course it’d have a fair share of football etc.

You might still be able to get permission from Samantha Janus to reprint that photo of her in the film 'Up & Under', where she's wearing an Aussie national shirt and little else ...

That's your Page 3 sorted for the first issue ....

Lets take our game back from the RFL then.

If people can overthrow governments then sure the same can be done for sporting organisations. The idea of becoming a fugitive doesn’t appeal to me though so don’t invite me to lead any revolution..





For the second one we could do a Rugby League wag. Ashley Gibson is with a glamour modal

I remember when the times used to sponsor the Super League coverage on Sky Sports.

Anyway, personally I'm not that concerned. National Newspapers will soon be defunct with technology moving on all the time. With hardly any copyright restrictions in the online world the working class (which is mainly what our sports fans are) are not the kind of people who will pay to read newspapers online.

I've always found national coverage a token gesutre anyway. They only seem to put the stuff in the northern editions from my experience.

A bigger priority for our game is getting a national highlights show onto BBC Television or another freeview broadcaster. Last year the BBC offered to do a highlights show for the Blue Square Premier (thats the non league of English Football). They actually turned it down. Yet we still have a regional highlights show that is clearly very low budget. Pathetic!

I also think they need to get all England tests back on the BBC. Now that Sky have taken (or will do next week) the football results show (Soccer Saturday) off Freeview we have a big opportunity to be a lead in to the "Final Score" show on the BBC. Could claw some exposure back. Then again improving the BBC coverage would perhaps be required.

What I don’t get is why we want to save our sport off the field. If a stadium was just piles of rubble and a rugby pitch I’d still go and watch if I really wanted to.

I don’t let how posh the surroundings are dictate my experience. I’ve watched Rhinos at Headingley many times and I’ve had good and bad experiences despite been in the same place.

You go to an estate like where I live you’ll find that the underclass are happy here and the working class aren’t despite it been the same location.

Sport is played without ‘professional surroundings’ and ‘professional equipment’. I went to a sink estate school and pupils still used an empty bottle to play football with.

Didn’t stop their enjoyment - just made the most of what their had.

That’s what we need to do with rugby league right now and stop with this obsession of expanding the game off the field.

Newspapers sales are in decline no matter what Chris Irvine says. Readers can get their news much quicker via 24 News channels and the internet, and most of that is for free. By the time a newspaper can get to press, the same news story is old news.

As a result national newspaper owners have to cater for what will sell copies. Football sells newspapers. Political scandals sell newspapers. Katie Price (unbelievably!) sells newspapers. A poxy little sport in the north of England doesn't sell newspapers.

You mention that The Times is owned by News Ltd, but Super League has one of the highest average ratings on Sky Sports behind football, rugby union internationals and cricket internationals. Therefore Super League is a valuable asset to Sky, and the fact they get exclusive broadcast rights means they pay more than if they didn't. ([sizeI mention that in an effort to silence those that say the BBC should broadcast the odd Super League game. Its a topic that gets on my tits reading this forum)[/size

Journalism as an industry is dying anyway. Print sales are falling, while internet advertising doesn't provide enough for any decent website to make a profit. Editors can often use fresh blood such as students, who provide decent copy that trying to get experience becomes slave labour. Once they leave they're thrown out in the wilderness and struggle to get a job even at a local level. The recession has made things ten times worse, so now freelance journalism is the only viable career opportunity in the industry.

Rugby League, whilst struggling to attract media coverage, is growing as a sport. More Kids are playing the game, the governing body have taken a dying sport and turned it into a profitable business (not quickly enough for some) and are trying to make the game a national sport rather than an M62 pastime.
Yes, the media are shocking in their lack of coverage, but that's nothing new. Before I got the RL bug in 2002, I really can't comment on the lack of covergage because I wasn't looking for it.....but that's the point. Unless Murray has a chance at wimbledon, Union do well in a RUWC/6 Nations or the ashes are on it's wall to wall wendyball. League (well in the south anyway) really never got a look in.
Journalists like rlTHIS GUYrl are few and far between, so much so that I nearly chocked on My Sunday Lunch when I read this, in print, in the Sunday Telegraph. Problem is, it's up to the RFL to get column inches and if you look at the attendance figures for wendyball, T20 or even Union then it is the advertisers that drive what's in a paper or not.
Wrongly...rightly, either way, your average Union fan is perceived to have more cash than his northern cousin......your average cricket fan at Lords wearing an MCC tie probably has a distant aunt who owns half of scotland and even though your wendyball fan may be as thick as pig, there are enough of them to warrant an ad spend. Compare this with a game that has a premier competition which has 12 of it's 14 teams pretty much along one stretch of motorway (wrexham isn't that far away) and you will see why anything other than local press has no real interest.I know not all northerners wear flat caps and fany pigeons, the same way all Londoners aren't pearly kings....but avertisers are becoming increasingly targeted in their spend and until the Northern Sport tag is removed, that's the brush league will be tarred with.