Watford Observer v WD Sport

Will there be a colour supplement on Sundays? And pull-out Financial, The Arts & What's On sections? If so I'm in.

 

Catchy!

 

He'd have to resign from the Star first!

 

There's now a Parliament section of this forum, I see no reason why we shouldn't do the same for the Daily WFChissyfitgoingdown Sport.

 

Fixed

 

Not really. You missed an apostrophe.

 

That's nuts. Surely Superman would just crush him? No contest.

 

Lex Luther irradiated Spider-Man with the power of the red Sun, allowing his punches to hurt superman. Once that wore off, Spider-Man was ineffectual and they both realised they'd been tricked into fighting one another.

 

Anyone else think they're obsessed with Sheffield Wednesday? More precisely with FF...

 

From WD Sport:

Manchester City have spent £134.7m on centre-halves since August 2008. Cathcart, Britos and Pr*dl didn't cost a penny


What? So? Are we in the Champions League? No.

The smugness of some of the posts on this site make me feel ill.

 

I think you've found the tag line they should use.

WD Sport - So?

 

Or WD Sport - No one likes a clever clogs.

 

None of our team , would get in theirs , so what's their point ?

 

I like their weekly reminders that Jadon Sancho used to be in our academy.

 

The article 'Odion Ighalo pulled the wool over the eyes of Sebastien Bassong' has the following sub-heading:

I'm patiently waiting for the day that they refer to Deeney and Capoue as 'fellow Europeans' or Britos and Paredes as 'fellow South Americans'! Their example is different, of course, because Africa is all one big country.

 

Increasingly, the stories coming from the WO and WD Sport are near enough identical. For example:

Watford defender Craig Cathcart says he knows from his experience at Blackpool that Premier League safety can never be taken for granted

and

Cathcart to relay lessons learned from chicken counting at Blackpool

Posted within 5 minutes of each other I think.

It's a shame that they can't just work together somehow. It's a waste of time sometimes having them both, and though there are often discernible differences, for a large part they are annoyingly (and predictably, given the subject matter) similar.

 

Trouble is they both go to the same media days, press conferences and the like and presumably the club doesn't favour one over the other when it comes to fixing interviews or setting embargoes. So instead it just ends up with this silly duplication.

I'm impressed WD Sport is still going however.

 

Exactly.

 

Why on earth would WObserver & WD work together? They're rival organisations, and one was set up by a former Wobserver staff member

 

Of course they won't. That's not my point at all. I'm saying it's a waste of time having them both sometimes, and it's a shame that we can't have all of their energies focused on just one publication. Then we wouldn't have duplicate stories and so on.

 

"Manchester City have spent a staggering £134.7m on centre-halves since August 2008 yet are still over reliant on Vincent Kompany. Craig Cathcart, Miguel Britos and Sebastian Pr*dl, the other hand, haven’t cost Watford a single penny which just goes to show money isn’t everything and spending a fortune doesn’t guarantee you anything."

It doesn't guarantee anything. It'll get you 2 Premier League titles, 2 domestic trophies, 5 Champions League qualifications, a bigger global brand, a larger fanbase, more ticket sales. But sure, it doesn't guarantee anything.

Good work WD Sport.

 

WD Sport are just showing a bit of genuine fan's passion for the club. There's nothing wrong with that. I like to see it & enjoy their website. The point they are making is, yes City's defence is probably better than ours, but maybe not £134.7m better. And without Kompany, it actually looks worse.

It's a fair point.

 

Affleck is such an arse in every conceivable manner.

He's also a UKIP supporter.

 

Not really - it's just propaganda that creates unnecessary delusion of grandeur amongst impressionable fans (most of whom operate on Twitter). It doesn't take into account the achievements or aspirations of either team. In other words, it's just uncircumstantial nonsense.

Most of us can see we're a good team, and we have media sources praising us left, right and centre.

Attempting to compare us to a perennial title-challenger is just clickbait. Which is journalism at its very worst if you ask me.

 

His writing style reminds me of a children's school project when they are asked to write in the style of newspaper journalism.

 

Oh god, next month there will be endless [GOSSIP] articles from the Observer. Mainly with rumours that are a few days old.

 

Oh god, next month there will be endless [RUMOUR] threads from idiots on here that currently run at a 15/0 success rate. Mainly with rumours that are bull**** and copied and pasted from Twitter.

 

I don't blame The WO for trying to ape (surprisingly successful) internet bog sites with stuff like that. Like most of the old-school printed press they are hanging on by their fingernails these days.

 

They could:

• Publish more opinion pieces from their writers
• Do more post-match round-ups (e.g. player ratings, what we learned from match x)
• Stop splitting up longer pieces (mostly pre-season interviews, I admit) in a user-hostile way, purely for advertising £££
• Embed more multimedia content from other sources
• Stop dragging out content for multiple days, e.g. reactions to Saturday's game until Wednesday or Thursday
• Interview the U21s
• Interview the U18s
• Interview past players
• interview the opposition
• Do reciprocal interviews with opposition journalists
• Posit who might break through next season and the one after
• Go with the zeitgeist: if people are stupid enough to think Jurado has no place in our squad, offer a statistical rebuttal or suggest an alternative
• Offer polls and other quick and easy ways for supporters to interact
• Capture more of their own A/V—if reporters have an iPhone, they have all they need to record an audio or video interview with a journalist/player/supporter and (a) post it to social media and (b) build a story around it on their site

The list above is completely off the top of my head—there will be loads more stuff, most of it more doable than this. Some of the stuff above, WD Sport do (not particularly well, I might say). Some of it the WO don't do due to the disastrous CMS they have to use. Or they struggle with reduced resources. Some of it they can only do if they are granted the right access. But it's all achievable in one way or another.

They have to be more reactive and journalistic. I work on a news website and after months I am only just convincing people that the news is there for them to capture if they want to, and it's easier than ever to publish an interesting story.

Its sad, but the WO has no voice any more.

 

I could add: the comments section on the WO site is an unmitigated disaster. They could improve this by their writers actually taking part in the discussion and doing some actual community management.

 

One advantage the WO does have is a huge archive (I assume). A daily "40 Years Ago Today" piece would, in the coming decades, chart the fascinating recent history of our club through both memorable and turbulent times.

 

You'd think they could have a portal to a section on a well run Watford Community forum or something. Punters driven to the forum and the admin handled for free.
Can't think of anywhere though.

 

They will both be missed if they are gone.

 

How about a politics section?