NRL encroachment into SA - implications for the AFL.

[Dogwatcher]

Apologies for the similar title to another thread.
However, the hysteria this week regarding the Matty Johns story has reinforced something I have noticed in recent times.
In South Australia, we have been gradually seeing more and more publicity regarding rugby league and issues/personalities involved in the sport.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that in the past three years we have seen more coverage of rugby league in this state than we did during the short lived Super Rules years.
Now I have no major problem with rugby league (it can be an entertaining sport) and it may be the Newsagent Provocateur within me but are we, an avowed Aussie rules state, being softened up? No doubt.
For example, many South Australians now have Foxtel/Austar (depending on their locality) and what sport do we receive unparalled coverage of? Rugby league.
Twenty-four hour sports news channel FSN has massive coverage of the sport during each day's news bulletins.
That's understandable, as the Rupert Murdoch backed media organisation is a national organism.
But...has anyone noticed the state's, our, main newspaper of late?
The Advertiser has featured regular stories on rugby league in the daily edition, including suggestions clubs should move here.
In the media's haste to plant all footballers in the same 'box' as Matty Johns (inherently sexist, chauvenistic and only concerned by their egos and the impact that things have on their own lives), even South Australian based football 'commentators' have had their say.
In today's Advertiser alone KG Cunningham described the NRL Footy Show hosts as 'boofheads' (fancy KG calling someone that!), while Ali Carle gave her thoughts on the story.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was on the front page asking sporting clubs to have more respect for women and even interstate based political commentator Andrew Bolt has had his say.
If we remember back a week, it was that 'popular' columnist Rebecca Wilson, an eastern states personality whose columns are foisted upon us weekly, who broke the story - her column in last Saturday's Tiser discussed the issue at length.
I'm not going to comment on the imbroglio in which Johns and league find themselves in (not here anyway) but the fact that rugby league is featuring in so many aspects of our state's major newspaper, on more than this occasion, is of concern to me and should be to all Aussie rules fans in this state.
The media's passing off of this story as significant to us is another step towards the erosion of Aussie rules in this part of the world and the homogenisation of us as consumers.
Maybe I'm paranoid. But really, who is Matty Johns to us South Australians?
I'm not attempting to make light of the group sex story but let us Aussie rules fans, while we're devoting considerable bandwidth to discussing the moral ins and outs of this situation, take a side look at what is actually happening.
By making this story a high profile news piece in our state, News Limited is softening us up with its propaganda, hoping that one day we will just embrace league as OUR game. A game in which it has significant amounts of money invested.
A game, which will, if further introduced to South Australia, open this state's population up to marketers and businesses associated with that sport.
I guess if we get to watch Friday night footy at a normal time, instead of three quarters behind the actual event, many of us may succumb.

[Interceptor]

I couldn't see states like SA or WA getting into League in any significant numbers unless there were teams based in those states.
I'd say the NRL realise these are tough markets, so most new teams in the last few years have been in established areas like Qld.

Having said that, the Storm have done pretty well in Melbourne, albeit in a very large city with room for a commerically viable niche audience.
That's the sort of audience they'll probably struggle to get in SA/WA, regardless of exposure, with the entrenched Aussie Rules culture.

[Pag]

It would be the same the opposite way, with the way the AFL is trying to continue to push into NSW and QLD. No matter what they do, league will always be the #1 priority to those states, regardless of how the Gold Coast and Western Sydney go (if they get in).

It will have no effect, is anybody here going to stop heading to the AFL/SANFL/Amateurs to watch a rugby league game? Unless they're already of a fan of it, I'd think not.

The AFL shouldn't even bother with Western Sydney, go with Tassie, where the people love the game for what it is. Same with the NRL. Don't worry about Adelaide or Perth, nobody cares.

[Wedgie]

I reckon you have a short memory DW, the Rams regularly made the back page of the paper, now I have to delve in about 7 or 8 pages to read about the NRL. The main thing that's changed these days is the media are even more trashy and will jump on any scandal no matter what sporting code its involved with, so no NRL haven't taken a stronger hold here but yes the media are more like bad New Idea Magazines.
They're so desperate they'll even jump on consenual sex between adults as a scandal these days.
League as a sport got more coverage here in the early 90s, maybe not in the paper as far as length of articles goes but as far as TV and other things NRL (or NSWRL or ARL as it was then known) got much more coverage with FTA coverage on 2 stations during the day.
Its virtually Foxtel or nothing these days as Channel 9s coverage is so ridiculously late you'd have more chance copping Hotdogs from Big Brother running a quiz.

In fact Rugby Union cops a lot more coverage than it used to and I must admit despite being a staunch League man for 20 years I probably take more interest in the Waratahs these days than Canberra or Leeds like I did in the past and the coverage has something to do with that as its virtually non existent of League these days.

I think Rugby League held high hopes of breaking into the SA market in the 90s but have virtually given up these days. I still remember more than 30k being at Adelaide Oval for a St George v Balmain game mainly because of the high coverage of Rugby League in those days.

I'm a big Rugby League fan but its more stagnant now than its ever been in the last 20+ years. It was a potential gold mine in the early 90s but they stuffed it all up.

[Dogwatcher]

I'm certainly not anticipating it taking over from our game.
But any incursion will see all important dollars taken from footy.

You probably are right about the time of the Rams.

However, I still say there is a genuine softening up process going on.

[Sojourner]

Small piece in the Sunday Mail today about Cronulla commiting to games here in S.A for two years, the club is also looking at playing in Darwin and the Central coast which has annoyed the organisers of the code here in S.A as they are looking for exclusivity for the side that plays their games here so that they can get people to support the club consistantly and be hooked into NRL as a result, the example given is Hawthorn who they believe have gained a number of members in Tasmania because of their clubs commitment to play there giving the locals a club to affiliate to in the medium term.

[rogernumber10]

I reckon there's another consideration you have to make and that is the shrinking nature of the media. Simply put, there aren't enough journalists to fill all the pages of newspace, so copied is being shared among titles more than ever.

In the mid 1970s, News Ltd titles (albeit not then, but now) such as the Advertiser, the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, the Courier Mail and the Mercury all had their own complete sport staffs filling their own pages, plus full complements of journos in other sections.

the best example of this was that every single Australian paper would send its own cricket writer to cover every Shield game, and it's own reporter to follow the test team, let alone how it covered footy / rugby league.

by the mid90s, News Ltd upper echelon pretty soon realised it was a lot cheaper to have 1-2 cricket writers covering the Australian team, instead of 7-8, and it was cheaper for home-based shield writers to cover the match for both states playing, rather than have a journo flying with every team.

Fast forward to 2009, sports departments are smaller than ever but newspace hasn't shrunk. Footy coverage is shared across the nation, albeit with some papers still travelling in rare instances, and copy across cricket / rugby league / afl / olympics etc etc is shared among multiple papers.

My argument is you get a lot of NRL in your papers in non-NRL states because there is an abundance of copy there available and the reporters in smaller markets such as Adelaide / Tassie can only file 2-3 stories a day, and not 5-6 to fill the paper. The other option of course is always AAP copy and greater coverage of overseas sports from agencies.

Ask your standard journo how many mastheads he writes for, and I'll be stunned if he / she answered only one, unless they in the privileged position of working for The Australia, or are a senior columnist.

[Magpiespower]

Adelaide is the 'nuclear option' for the NRL and its struggling clubs.

Absolute last resort.

A team on the Central Coast is the number one priority.

With Central Queensland and a second Brisbane team the next cabs off the rank.

[Dogwatcher]

Rog, I get the fact there have been changes in the media. However, why not fill the space with features that appear in the Melb papers on Aussie rules that we may not have seen?

[rogernumber10]

Rog, I get the fact there have been changes in the media. However, why not fill the space with features that appear in the Melb papers on Aussie rules that we may not have seen?

From my way-too-close viewing of all our papers, it seems to me that Sunday papers in another state regularly run longer features that have run in other states 2-3 days earlier, or sometimes weeks earlier. The Age and the West Australian, in particular, will often run the other's features several days later, while a few of our Sunday papers run stories that were run in dailies in other states several days earlier, if they aren't a straight news story that dates, and haven't been run in that state in the following few days.
However, the big issue for papers is that they have an assumption that many readers already know stories off radio / tv / net and therefore they run a fresh story of another sport, such as NRL, in place of a footy story that they think people may have read part of.

[Dogwatcher]

Figured as much.

BTW - further stories on Greg Bird and Willie Mason in the Tiser today. Plus an editorial on the behaviour of sportsmen.