Some very good points made to an indolent administration which is not operating at the top of its game --- if you'll pardon the pun!

With TV sport dominated by major sports like Football, Cricket, Rugby Union, Athletics, Tennis, Golf etc and events like the Olympics, Football World Cup, European Club and International Football, Cricket Tours, Tennis and Golf competitions, Rugby Union Six Nations and European Club Competitions, it must be like banging your head against a brick wall to get publicity for Rugby League, especially now that since Union went fully professional and our game is now regarded as a minority sport as a result of no longer attracting the top players of the rival code and a situation that good players from League now go to Union.

The topic has been started by someone who it would appear works on a sports desk, so what is his Sports Editor doing to improve the lot of the game. Any information needed can be obtained from the websites, not only of the RFL, but all Clubs.

No matter how much the RFL do, they will now always be fighting a uphill battle when as a result of Sky, TV sport is now about world major sports events and not a game played mainly in the the North of England.

In the modern world, as print media dies a slow death, there are fewer journalists and staff photographers available to cover what could reasonably be described as a minority interest; it seems to me that this journalist is making a very well intentioned plea to the RFL to do what other sports have done in response to that - generate the copy themselves and provide a decent image to go with.

If anything, this confirms the widely held belief that the RFL is dysfunctional and unprofessional in many areas of its operation.

If you think about RL as a product, and you are the owner trying to get the world to buy into your product.

You could send out samples, get marketing products out to potential buyers, create online and email marketing to the big stores and smaller consumers continually send out information about your products and how good it is, take out advertisments on TV radio and newspapers, invite and bring in all your friends and people who like your product and get them onside to promote it for you via facebook and twitter etc empower a membership scheme for the whole game a bit like how Labour have done recently.

OR

You could you sit and wait for people to come to you and not allow people to come to your little poorly attended press conferences were you are pandering to same old faces day in day out week in week out who in the main work in paper media that is dying out.

The RFL shot themselves in the foot about 8 years when they negated the national newspapers by declared allegiance to the Daily Mirror as the "written voice" of rugby league. When they did that the amount of column inches shrunk dramatically with the Daily Mail and Daily Express etc. on match reports, yet anything negative about the game quickly attracted interest to show our sport in a bad light.

About as well summed up as is possible.

He's got a point about the late finishes. Any match on Sky seems to last an eternity as every blooming decision is sent to the VR. An 8pm start should have be over by 9.30pm, 9.40 at most. We've had a few when we didn't finish until 9.50pm.

There's a fella down here in London who works for The RFL called David Lawrenson. He emphasised the point to us (I setup a club down here along with another fella) that the best way to get publicity is to spoon-feed underpaid and overworked journalists with material on a regular basis.

Shame that one (talented) bloke out in the field has more of a clue than those at HQ (although this is entirely consistent with my own experience of the RFL over the past five or so years anyway...).

I fail to believe that for a six figure salary we couldn't get someone better than Nige.

I saw one of the RL Journos disputing this, saying that they do communicate with him and the like.
I don't think he understands this though. We don't need him to be drip fed items. He is going to write about them regardless, because he is a RL journo. We need the rest of the press to sit up and take note.

If you are trying to grow you club/brand/company, you have to attract new customers. Same with media coverage. If the same few guys are writing the articles, you are never going to increase the coverage.

I'm not having that, chippy Northerners are telling us that the RFL have being flooding that there London with marketing for over 30 years and doing a fantastic job of spreading the game but nobody is interested! Fooking idiots the lot of them.
To make matters worse they even paid themselves over the recommended salaries for a job well done (as stated in the 2015 annual report) as set by their self appointed auditors.

newspapers are dying out and being replaced by new forms of media. the rfl needs someone with forward thinking. even sport on tv isn't assured of its place in the future. things like facebook live and fan made broadcasts are where sports broadcasting is heading

The NFL has got it spot on IMO by streaming Thursday night games live on Twitter.

interestingly some clibs dont like even press conferences streaming live never mind anything else.

Something needs to be done and done soon and also done properly.

To attract consumers the product needs to be good. At the moment our product isn't, if we are honest. Second, to get lot's of interest there needs to be a demand. At the top level in this country rugby league is a sport played predominantly in the north of england, therefore demand will always be limited. Fans won't even turn up in the heartlands, at the games most famous clubs. Week in week out games are played on sky in front of practically half empty stadiums.

Can they do better? I'm sure they can.

But will it be like banging your head against a brick wall? Probably.

Yeah ''something'' needs to be done. 'Someone' needs to do 'something'.

Like what?

Perhaps being more pro active for starters would help.
What would you like to be done?

Id like clubs to actually pull their fingers out and market themselves. Community engagement is generally poor from our clubs and marketing seems to consist of sticking a sign outside the ground and sending emails to people who are already going.

We also desperately need to start working together as a sport.

I get that clubs aren't going to advertise other teams games but they can advertise and sell tickets and travel for big events like Magic Weekend, Big Bash, Cup semis, Cup Final, Grand Final etc and of course for internationals. Looking at the clubs you wouldn't even know that the 4 Nations was taking place.

The clubs can whine all they want about the RFL, when they're only getting a few thousand people in to watch then there's plenty that the clubs can do to get more in.

We have talked about match awareness that clubs should do to make the locals aware of when they are playing at home who ther playing at home and KO time and admission prices. Some clubs do others just hope that fans turn up, or it seems to me they do.

Believe it or not Wakefield advertise Magic Weekend, The Challeneg Cup, the Grand Final and international matches all the time.

There is nothing much wrong with RL as a sport, in fact it is one of the greatest team sports ever and remains so, what the problem is is the way its leaders treat it with their inability to run the sport from week to week and year to year. The main aspect is officiating and application of the rules (or lack thereof) during matches, its vaugue, inconsistent and often illogical and most definitely unprofessional from top to toe. There's also the inequity/consistancy regarding the disciplinary.

It's down to the RFL to make the game appealing by cleaning things up and having defined rules that officials keep to. Players/coaches soon come into line when penalised to death.
It's down to the RFL to come up with initiatives to selk the game, clubs can only do so much within their locality and as far as I can tell the vast majority do have lots of community stuff going on. Again the problem lies at the door of the RFL Who have being impotent for decades and basically sat on their laurels with next to no clue how media and attracting new fans (& sponsors) works.
As a sport we've missed the boat and missed it big time, in an ever shrinking market we are surviving on crumbs. It's almost laughable that each SL club only receives the equivalent of £19,230 per week from TV sponsorship.
At the end of the current sky deal as a sport I really worry for us and the future despite how entertaining rugby league is.

At the end of the day a lot of this boils down to £££s. The RFL just doesn't have the kind of cash reserves required to push the sport. They made a pre-tax profit last year of £201,000 ffs. Half the clubs want rid of Wood, while the other half are quite happy to tread water. The RFU made £15million from their World Cup alone. There needs to be a drastic overhaul of the game in this country if we're ever going to compete with them. Or the NRL could just lend us a few million from its deal...

Do you know about the old addage about speculating to accumlate, the RFl have several million in cash reserves, that's despite the Bradford debacle. Maybe they should have stopped giving away tickets virtually free for events like magic weekend, maybe if they had the event closer in the middle of the country MORE fans from other areas would fill the grounds and be okay with a few more quid to pay for a ticket because they aren't having to travel 250+ miles
Maybe if the fat-bastrds stopped paying themselves over the auditors guidelines every year there would be more money in the pot for them to do stuff/employ more people, maybe if they'd got off their s 30/20/10 years ago when opportunity after opprtunity arose, even after RU started getting its act together. Maybe if they'd laid claim to the 'rugby world cup' title so the other lot couldn't use it and all that it helps their game by sole use of such we wouldn't be having an uphill battle.
They're fat, lazy and greedy and always have been, they don't even do the basics such as ensuring the rules of the game are administered on the field of play correctly, they're interested in themselves, they aren't custodians of the game that's for sure.

We the fans are complicit in the ineptitude of the RFL and the actions of some self-serving clubs. Time after time the RFL offer a plate of manure and the fans rub their tummy and say yum yum. We collectively have a huge voice that we never use.

We often talk about innovation in RL, but for every innovation we also have a gimmick. The 8s scenario is a gimmick every day of the week. A tier of complication which makes selling the RL product harder. Even if I thought I could articulate how the 8s work to the uninitiated, I'd frankly be embarrassed to do so. But time after time we meekly accept the absolute gibberish that our governing body bestows upon us. We say nothing, and we do nothing.

The RFL and the clubs certainly need to push the Comms agenda better than they currently are. However there is an element of tosh in the Journalists open letter. The I or the Independent has its own website which is 24/7. Indeed all other papers run websites which all have businesses paying for advertising. It's quite probable that the Independent get more hits on the website each day than papers sold. Though it's pretty dreadful to navigate. I do accept that the length of games is getting silly. I think the Leeds v Leigh first half took 57 minutes to complete with the same in the second half its easily past 10 pm and the press run.

However, I don't accept the whole argument put forward that if games finish after a certain time at night, it's not worth their time. Okay they might not sell a paper but all papers have a website, the more content and relevance of the content the more interest and views your likely to get. Secondly, there are plenty of games in SL still played on a Sunday with a number of clubs keeping this as their main game day. The Independent website, has it covered anything RL since August? Certainly not a match report. I think I managed to find the report (12 Sept) about on Oz player dying after a tackle.

There is a desperate need for the RFL and clubs to feed information in printable format, with images for website and paper format but the printed (and their websites) are not exactly bothered. And I would question how bothered they would be if fed the information.