It’s been another bad week for the newly minted hack wannabee Kris Boyd, with numerous social media sites here and in England, as well as a number of media professionals, turning their guns on him for another childish, spiteful article which was dripping with idiocy and contempt for other people. Who’s he trying to be here, the Kate Hopkins of the sports section?
None of this makes him look good, and it makes the paper look ridiculous. At a time when real journalists are losing their jobs it must grate on those who’re clinging on in newsrooms by their fingernails to see a halfwit like this given the prominence he has.
I wonder how Keith Jackson and his professional colleagues feel about having to share column inches with guys like Boyd and Ferguson, whose combined brainpower couldn’t light a six watt bulb. It says a lot for the decline of a once mighty industry.
Someone suggested to me the other day that hiring guys like Boyd was an effort to compete with the bloggers online. But the Daily Record has already experimented with that, hiring a couple of them for its site and that’s drawn an almost overwhelmingly bad response in spite of the fact that both are far better writers than Ferguson or Boyd will ever be. And that’s the crucial thing; these guys are so far below the standards of the average blogger that it only compounds the embarrassment many in the newsrooms must feel.
This is a declining industry in a full-on battle for its own survival. Numbers are falling. Advertising revenues are migrating elsewhere. The smartest, savviest audience is the one reading, and sometimes writing, on the blogs. The quality of print journalism needs to be far, far above the current level of dreck in order to compete, and this is their answer; to fill the pages with the inane wittering’s of Scottish football’s village idiot.
Do they even care about standards anymore? Do they care about keeping readers? Who, out there, can realistically believe this guy has anything important to say? His comments about Ian Cathro were ridiculous; contemptuous and contemptible in equal measure. Boyd has his place in the football history books for holding a record of little repute or renown. If he didn’t have the game to fall back on this guy wouldn’t get a job stacking shelves in Asda.
My bet would be that Cathro will achieve something of substance in the sport.
Boyd may eventually try his hand at management; you can already see how that will end.
But no-one should be under any illusions that this joker is a writer. He probably had to be given a gentle reminder that his first name is spelled with a K. If his columns are being ghosted then the profession is in even bigger danger than I thought.
If you want a look at how seriously print journalism in Scotland takes the challenges facing it, this guy and his mate are an object lesson. The contempt it betrays for their shrinking readership is astounding. It’s almost like they don’t want to survive.
Because on this evidence they certainly don’t deserve to.