Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 8:16 am  

Has anyone else noticed that Ross hasn't written any of the T&A articles since 25 Nov & his Twitter profile no longer says that he works for the T&A?
Have I missed something? There's plenty for him to report at the moment.

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 8:28 am  

Pickles wrote:

his Twitter profile no longer says that he works for the T&A?

That's largely because he no longer works for the T&A.

[Bullseye]

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 8:49 am  

He's been made redundant. Simon Parker taking over Bulls stuff at the moment.

Think Ross needed a change anyway, maybe not redundancy but a change from reporting on the Bulls.

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 8:52 am  

There's been a few redundancies at the T&A apparently, not just him.

If you notice since he left, there's a lot of articles essentially just lifted from the Bulls website and tweaked a little. So it appears the T&A are going down the route of having Parker just cover the Bulls instead of having one person dedicated to it as their primary role. It'll likely mean more filler just lifted from elsewhere and less original stuff I would think. Not a big deal for the coverage of an off season, but may find less things of value when the season begins.

[Bullseye]

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:11 am  

I don’t really understand the logic of the move by the T&A really given the Bulls articles seem to be amongst the most popular on their website. If they’re not going to be any different from what you get via the club anyway why visit the T&A website? It’s hard enough since their web version requires you remove the advertisement blocker now for a lot of articles which many including me won’t do.

Another nail in the coffin of local newsprint.

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:20 am  

You only need to look at the comments section in the T & A Bulls column to see why Ross has decided to tend the vegetables in his own garden and not in the paper

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 1:06 pm  

Maybe he's heading one of the consortiums with his redundancy money.

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 1:21 pm  

Pickles wrote:

Has anyone else noticed that Ross hasn't written any of the T&A articles since 25 Nov & his Twitter profile no longer says that he works for the T&A?
Have I missed something? There's plenty for him to report at the moment.

He has written a report in the League Weekly this week about Adrian Morleys new position at the Rhinos

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 1:23 pm  

Ross' journalism style was often to regurgitate garbage he read elsewhere anyway - I don't think he'll be overly missed.

Re: Ross Heppenstall : Wed Dec 07, 2016 1:25 pm  

It's the same with reporting on local politics and the council executive too, and it's across the land rather than the T&A. They need to fix that before they do it with local sports reporting. They don't employ journalists, or rather do but don't fund journalism, and it's been the same since NewsQuest took over most local newspapers in the nineties.