The Fourth Estate - football in print

Football in the papers. It's part of life. We can spot a sports fan just by watching them in a newsagent, on the train or in a library. They're the one who pick up the paper, ignore perhaps world changing events on the front page, and flip straight to the back. But what else do we see when we pick up that paper?

Like most other parts of the printed media, you can get a good idea of the philosophy of that paper just by the name on the top. Humour, gossip, agendas and good traditional journalism can be found in different measures in each.Take Britain's dailies for example. Each will have a different viewpoint on events, and you could quite easily read a different one every day and have that day's mood satisfied.

Classic headline? Or just lame pun?

Twitter has made minor celebrities of football writers, oracles in a community of people wanting everything yesterday, where free opinions aren't enough. A retweet of an up-and-coming blog or an endorsement can do the power of good. A good teaser post by a journo could earn their paper hundreds of sales.

But papers (and of course their writers and editors) can create a huge amount of controversy. The most famous (infamous?) perhaps being the Sun's reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy, recently re-visited as part of the Parliamentary debate. The Guardian's Barry Glendenning caused a small ripple of annoyance after making a comment about Spurs perhaps milking minor miracles... Reputations are made and broken, and again going back to the Sun, the Graham Taylor turnip incident.

Taylor's alternative to the England manager umbrella

After England's miserable Euro '92 campaign, The Sun referred to the manager Taylor as a turnip, and thus pretty much tarring him for life, even now as he is a fairly regular (and often insightful) contributor to BBC Radio 5.

Does our choice of newspaper reflect us? Should we pigeon-hole the papers, to the point where we have to be exclusive - the Guardian is capable of being just as humourous as a red-top, while the Star has been known to make the odd insightful article... Even if it is just Sepp Blatter's designs for women's football kits...

The Telegraph's coverage of women's cricket was obviously flawed

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