The Age Footy Magazine - Alex Woodward

[83 Hawks]

The Sunday Age today included its annual footy season preview magazine. It has stats and a brief comment on each player from each team. It's usually the only edition of the Age I buy all year, and I don't think I'll be bothering even with this one edition in future. Thought this commentary on Alex Woodward gives a fair indication of the level of knowledge / research of the writers:

"Coming along nicely in the VFL but still a bit small and maybe still too far dwon the pecking order for an inside midfielder".

It's not atteibuted to any particular writer, but it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence on the writers opinion of our other young players I haven't seen yet.

 

[grizzlym]

Yep, the supplement is littered with generic content that no one seems to have checked/updated. Matty Suckling is another case in point. Off memory, it doesn't even make mention of WX recovering from a serious injury.

It's a piss poor effort from our better paper.

 

[The BIG X]

Yep, the supplement is littered with generic content that no one seems to have checked/updated. Matty Suckling is another case in point. Off memory, it doesn't even make mention of WX recovering from a serious injury.

It's a piss poor effort from our better paper.

Better than what

 

[grizzlym]

Better than what

MX

 

[The BIG X]

Brilliant

 

[Gold Member]

By using the term "better" grizz actually means "less shit".

 

[Collins-Langford-Ayres]

I don't know why these rags don't outsource the initial copy to our BigFooty team. They'd get a better article and we could get them to donate the savings to charity.

 

[stemline]

Yeah, they reckon Whitecross has made a name for himself minding small forwards and is all set for a big year.

 

[kidkenobi]

I was trying to find out who wrote those little blurbs for each player also, as they seemed quite vague and it was obvious whoever wrote them didn't have an intimate knowledge of the players, especially the ones who weren't already established.

I wouldn't assume any sports writer has a better knowledge of your own players than you do if you're someone who sees them play week-in-week-out. I would feel comfortable writing an in-depth analysis for each Geelong player, but having said that, I wouldn't even have a clue who Alex Woodward is, and I can't imagine any journo would know as much about him as some Hawk fans would.

Obviously there's a lot of players to cover if you're going to be a footy journo, but in some cases they should defer to someone else's better knowledge instead of just writing for the sake of filling space.

 

[La Vache]

Every club released a 2012 analysis of their lists through the AFL website. You would think the writer could use that as a starting point at least.

 

[nickrebellious]

He could have glanced at this website and known everything.