Newcastle United have become no stranger to some abhorrent media coverage over the past couple of years.
Whether it be misrepresentative coverage, doom mongering journalistic pieces way wide of the mark, or uninformed pundits giving embarassing opinions on a club they know nothing about - we have become privy to it all.
Quite frankly, I could sit here all day writing about those who have shown themselves up in recent weeks, of which another rather glaring punditry disaster was added today with Charlie Austin's appearance on Sky Sports News.
What Charlie Austin said
Austin was on Sky Sports just having general football chat with the host, talking about the transfer window and the opening weekend of the Premier League.
That led to him being asked about Newcastle United, more specifically what we need and should be targeting between now and the end of the transfer window.
Austin's response was that we need a right back and a goalkeeper... yes, you read that right.
He was then informed by the rather confused host that we have, in fact, already signed two goalkeepers, both of which have played in our first two games, and a right back in Amar Dedic who bagged two assists against one of Austin's former clubs in West Brom literally yesterday.
What a showing of knowledge that is for a Sky Sports pundit we pay copious amounts of money every year to watch spout nonesense analysis about
The state of modern media
Obviously more often than not, the diabolical media discourse I see on my feed is surrounding Newcastle, but I'm more than aware of the fact that every single football fan experiences it on a weekly, if not daily basis.
Unfortunately, it is merely indicative of the modern journalistic standard that we constantly have to put up with watching, reading and consuming content about our football club which is simply not fit for purpose.
And perhaps the worst part about it is the world is not short of excellent journalism, content and well researched analysis, we just don't get to see it because of the monopoly that keeps the big outlets visible and drowns the voices of those smaller in stature, no matter how good they may be.
We are living in an attention economy, where everything which is pushed to the masses is merely another baiting scheme to prioritise cheap clicks and revenue of genuine content which builds a strong and engaged reader base.
And maybe we can only partially blame the outlets themselves and instead must look back at the society we have created through social media and all the rest that has constantly rewarded and reinforced that shoddy content gets more attention than the genuinely insightful stuff.
Where do we go from here
Whilst I do think the sentiment is shifting ever so slightly back toward people wanting insight which adds to their knowledge base, the scope for change which will ultimately maintain the sustainability of the journalism industry well into the future is still monumental.
The push back against lazy, sloppy and simply unacceptable content has become increasingly louder in the past couple of years.
The big companies like that of Sky Sports have already begun to take notice of their declining viewership, and there has been an obvious rise in viewership for those providing content which is infinitely more interesting that what we are forced to see everyday.
Hopefully that trajectory will continue and the future will bring a much more informative view of sporting topics by those in the professional space because at present, the consensus all agree that this current media landscape cannot continue in the same vein for long.
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