Sport

Why the GAA is getting their media relations all wrong

Brendan Crossan

Brendan Crossan

Brendan is a sports reporter at The Irish News. He has worked at the media outlet since January 1999 and specialises in GAA, soccer and boxing. He has been the Republic of Ireland soccer correspondent since 2001 and has covered the 2002 and 2006 World Cup finals and the 2012 European Championships

The GAA needs to re-examine how it handles media relations
The GAA needs to re-examine how it handles media relations The GAA needs to re-examine how it handles media relations

EVERY sports journalist wants to be able to write like Hugh McIlvanney. To describe McIlvanney as a sports journalist doesn't do the man justice.

He's a literary giant. Peerless in his field and the consummate producer of masterpieces.

Every time you read McIlvanney you come away feeling you've dined out on the finest cuisine.

Last weekend, McIlvanney announced his retirement – well, semi-retirement – in The Sunday Times. Now 82, he will be making only fleeting appearances in the newspaper.

He wrote a brilliant semi-farewell column last weekend. It was more of a lament about a profession that has been overcome by a major technological shift.

"Technology," he writes, "has delivered many a boon to the working reporter but in sport, especially, there are penalties. The demand for instant information and comment for the internet... must eat into the opportunities for the ferreting around that I always found productive in the immediate aftermath of an event."

He adds: "I envy the present generation of sports writers their youth but not their operating conditions."

McIlvanney is correct in his assertion. Journalism faces huge challenges.

In my 17 years as a sports journalist the industry has changed greatly.

It has become an unquestionably harder industry to work in.

Journalism requires more stamina these days.

It still has its rewards; you just have to work a little harder to reach them.

After enriching his readers for six decades or more with exclusive and insightful interviews with sports stars such as Muhammad Ali, Pele and Johan Cruyff, McIlvanney lamented other changes to the profession he loved.

"Of no less interest to me is the shrinkage of meaningful access," he writes.

"At World Cup finals, it was once natural to walk into the hotel of, say, the great Dutch team of the 1970s and find Johan Cruyff or Johan Neeskens ready to talk frankly and at length, or to spend half a day with Helmut Schoen when he was in charge of West Germany...

"But that privileged access is firmly associated in my mind with the atmosphere and ethos of those days, a time when the links between journalists writing about sport and the subjects were more relaxed and more real."

I read McIlvanney’s fine prose on Sunday morning before heading off to Pairc Esler to cover the Allianz National Football League game between Down and Kerry.

Last Sunday was a joyless assignment at the Co Down venue, the kind of which McIlvanney would be up in arms about.

If it wasn’t deflating enough watching Down struggle against superior opposition, press reporters were stopped by stewards at the gate that leads you to the back of the changing rooms.

Meanwhile, RTE and TG4 were given rites of passage into where the post-match interviews take place.

Loitering, press reporters with their official GAA passes were given no reason as to why they were being denied access for an unspecified period of time.

The stewards insisted they were only following orders but it was a particularly galling situation because Kerry boss Eamonn Fitzmaurice was unaware that the press could not gain access and was keen to conduct his post-match interview duties as quickly as possible.

A freelance broadcast journalist, who was inside the enclosure, told stewards that the press needed to gain access now or run the risk of missing Fitzmaurice.

The entire episode was undignified and completely unnecessary.

As part of the press corps, I felt we were Pairc Esler's rodent problem.

McIlvanney lamented the "shrinkage of meaningful access". On Sunday, we simply wanted access.

Whether some people care to acknowledge it or not, that fanatically guarded enclosure just outside the changing rooms is a reporter's workplace for a very brief period.

Imagine a plumber or an electrician being prevented from entering their workplace on any given morning.

Or a schoolteacher being denied access to their classroom.

Experiences such as last Sunday afternoon has eroding effect on everyone.

Of course, it’s not all negative. It's only right to acknowledge reporters were treated well in the press box last Sunday.

But it's the post-match negativity that leaves a bitter taste.

Indeed, there’s an emerging layer of bureaucracy that has crept into the GAA. It's not the sole preserve of Down.

The sad consequence is that meaningful access shrinks a little more.

It makes the job of a sports journalist more difficult to tell stories, real, insightful stories about its subjects - not the kind of clichéd, sound bite-driven pieces that emerge from the ever-growing number of GAA press conferences.

Given the time pressures and need for instant comment within the newspaper industry combined with the rigid format of GAA press events, the one-to-one interview is edging perilously close to extinction.

That would be the real tragedy of our industry, and for the Association.

With some “ferreting” there are still many generous subjects within the GAA community who allow us to escape the hamster's wheel of the anodyne quote and liberates us from the claustrophobic surroundings of dank press rooms and press officers to produce meaningful work that adds to GAA discourse.

If you haven't noticed already the blandness is killing us all by a thousand cuts.

We inhabit an era where the journalist stands at the guarded gate looking in from a distance.

Maybe that's our place and we should learn to get used to it.

But, before we realise, the barricaded journalist no longer cares, everyone learns to live with the disconnect and colourless landscape, and some stories are left untold.