Celtic Cyberspace Is Filled With Quality. Glasgow World Is The Bit Beneath The Barrel.

In every media ecosystem, there are a small number of elite titles. They break big stories. They drive events. They have important things to say. Beneath them are layers, and obviously the lower you go the lower the quality, until you get to those which post 50 things a day just to get clicks and hits. I used to think they were the bottom of the barrel.

Celtic cyberspace has dozens of sites now, and everyone has their own views about where individual sites fit on the big board. That’s always up to the reader to decide that and it will vary according to people’s individual tastes.

But I know this; most of us know what the real trash looks like and who produces it. We know which sites you can go to for news and opinions and which are just purveyors of clickbait and will do anything to get your attention, shady misleading headlines and all. I always thought they were as low as internet “journalism” could go.

And then Glasgow World came along, and redefined what the real bottom is. Because there is a layer below the bottom of the barrel. In fact, there’s a layer beneath the barrel itself, and when you move it away and dig a little, that’s where you find them.

Last night I had the misfortune to click on their latest piece of bog-standard junk, an article entitled “Every (Ibrox) and Celtic star available to sign right now as several Premiership players up for free transfers”. And I thought “Eah?”

Because, of course, nobody is available to sign right now unless it’s on a pre-contract agreement, and the only people who don’t know whose contracts are up at their own club at the end of this season are the ones not paying attention to anything.

Who is that article for exactly? What’s its function and purpose?

If you presume, as is a fact, that the only club in the league which might conceivably have players out of contract who could get into our squad is the one at Ibrox – and we’re not interested in signing any of those – then that article isn’t for us. If you assume we have the only players leaving on free transfers who their club might consider signing – and they’re not going to do that – then it’s not for their fans either. Further, assume none of the players from Parkhead or Ibrox are going to sign for clubs lower down in this league … who, then, is its audience?

That headline is written to get hits from our fans and theirs, and all of us know right away that there’s nothing in there worth reading. And it gets worse, because the first person who Ben Banks names – for he is the writer of this absolute piece of trash – is Joe Hart.

Joe Hart. Who is retiring. And so isn’t available to sign for anybody, not even those Saudi teams which will pay the guy the earth no matter what age he is. And once you realise that this is one of the foundation stones of the article, all of it, by the way, gleaned from Transfermarkt.com, a site so bad that the news aggregators won’t let blogs use it as a “primary source”, you actually feel that scuzzy way like someone who’s walked into cobwebs.

I might disagree with my fellow bloggers at times, and I might express that in various ways, although I don’t usually unless it’s something really egregious, but I have the utmost respect for every single one of them, and the work that they do. All of them, by the way, regardless of what it is that they are writing. Not one of the fan sites would entertain trash like that.

Not one of them. That’s an amazing thing to consider when you think about it.

It takes a mainstream title to come up with something as bad as that, as stinking as that, and the problem I have with that is that we, the bloggers, need to jump through hoops to get on the aggregators and to have our work garner even a modicum of respect … and all the while having to compete with a mainstream title which produces garbage like that.

The best thing those who want to support fan media can do is never, ever to read what is on those sites. Glasgow World is the absolute worst of the lot, the one which “predicts” matches based on how they come out on EA Sports FC and Football Manager. If there’s anything worth reading on that site, ever, it will be the first time there was and probably the last.