Quote ="Wadski"There are two weekly newspapers and one monthly magazine.
The weekly newspapers are pretty much similar in their setup and style and even have the same style columnists.
I can only talk about RLE after being a subscriber but their layout is pretty much the same week in week out. Off the top of my head:
4 pages SL news (2 articles per club)
2 pages of Championship news
2 pages of Champrionship1 news
1 Stevo page
1 Sadler / news page
SL Match reports (one of the TV games centre pages with Opta Stats which we'd pretty much already know from watching it)
C Match Reps
C1 Match Rep
2 pages reserve / academy
Amateur News / Reports / Fixtures
2 Pages of Letters
2 page of International / comment
1 pages of scores.
The news is generally made up of things that have happened the previous week with a couple of exclusives. This can be found easily on the internet nowadays.
By Sunday night we can have seen all the SL tries.
I think they need to concentrate less on transcribing the games (1 or 2 pages per game is overkill) and more on 'how and why' - why was the try scored, who was out of position, was it preventable.
I'd like to see stats of every game, more post match comments, interviews with players after the games (for example MoM interviews).
More about training routines, diet and the different methods players use to get fit.
Info on 'sick lists' - updates on players who are injured - where they are with their rehab. What are they doing to to keep fit, interviews with them.
Info from the RFL on Referees, feedback and comment on the referees performance (ideally unbias)
That's off my head as I sit here - some of it may be impossible / out of budget.
The newspapers need to assume that people will have heard much of the news before they publish therefore they need to being it in a different manner. An example would be the Newton incident - rather than report he has failed a drug test 6 days after it was announced, report on Wakefields plans and problems caused by his suspension.'"
You hit upon a problem that confronts anyone who is producing a weekly newspaper in the Internet age - how much space to give to news that is already in the public domain!
Ideally we would like all our news to be completely exclusive and new. And yet as a newspaper of record, if a player has signed a new contract in the previous week we have to report that in the following Monday's League Express.
Having said that, a lot of the Super League news that features in League Express comes fresh into the newspaper after the weekend's games.
Some of the points you make are interesting ones, although putting together a newspaper that has to cover 36 professional clubs and the whole of the amateur game means that we have to ration our resources to some degree.
As far as the stats of every game is concerned, Opta don't complete their analysis until Monday morning, although I would like nothing more than to publish all the stats if they could be produced more quickly.
We also have the problem that some players are difficult for our reporters to get hold of straight after a match.
Furthermore, when we do reader surveys we find that not all our readers agree on precisely what they would like to read in the newspaper.
But thanks for your thoughts, which I'll take on board and consider carefully.
