Breaking news? The football media got all “Jimmy Olsen” over the details of a kebab store kerfuffle.

Another week, another scandal, another eye-roll. Shall we go down the rabbit hole once again, folks?

No doubt Irish recruit Conor McKenna’s pointed criticism of the footy media this week, after pulling the pin on his AFL career, was motivated primarily by the intrusive commentary surrounding his positive test for COVID-19 earlier this year.

But in the wake of the tabloid pile-on after Sydney Stack ordered a late-night takeaway on the Gold Coast, it’s not difficult to make a connection between McKenna’s barbs and the saturated and often inane coverage of the AFL’s off-field landscape.

Giving all due nods to the seriousness of a hub breach amidst such tension and uncertainty during the pandemic, the hyperbole and minutiae which accompanied the transgressions by Stack and Tiger teammate Callum Coleman-Jones was all too typical of the lust for breaking news – in technicoloured, sordid detail.

Close ups and “analysis” of McKenna’s mucus on one hand, an interview with a kebab shop owner on the other. We must posit the question: who gives a flying fig? Well, someone does:

Why did this stuff become newsworthy? What is driving such meaningless filler? Put simply, it is a matter of scale, content and competition.

As was reported this week, pre-COVID 19 the number of staff employed by the AFL had risen to a staggering 795. That number included the powerful AFL Media entity, the real game-changer and industry disrupter when it was established in 2012.

Replete with studios and editing suites, 100-plus staff pump out swathes of news and video content to stock the league’s multi-platform offline and online offerings and syndicated affiliates. Smaller versions generating content are also operating in club land.

“The game’s popularity has increased so much that there’s now an insatiable appetite for everything in and around the game,” said AFLPA chief, Paul Marsh. “The money coming through from broadcasters is so significant and they want access. Of course, they have to find content.

“The industry has made a choice – it will take that [money] and the players get a share and it’s a by-product of what we’ve sold. This is the cycle: the media exposure drives public interest and without it the game isn’t as valuable. It’s what sets it apart.”

So much content, so much clickbait, driving so much sponsor exposure and ad revenue. How could “traditional” media entities compete?

One way is to engage in a veritable race to the bottom, desperate to be first with the story – however significant or otherwise – and the most graphic.

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The sports writers of yore have morphed into wannabe tabloid investigators, sifting through the trash akin to the grubby Murdoch-era scandal sheets in the UK. It did not happen overnight, but the enormous pressure to produce content has intensified the frivolous and the intrusiveness.

Veteran journalist and author Martin Flanagan summed up the generational divide between those who wrote and opined on the game when he was filing match reports compared to some footy journalists today.

“I never sat in the press box,” said Flanagan. “I always wanted to be on the fence … I never felt part of the journalistic sub-culture. I was never much interested in that gossip tradition, the manufactured drama; I’m not at all interested in it. For me it was about the game.”

One of the rejoinders to the second tweet highlighted above – and there were many – ran along the lines of “Surely AFL journalism is better than this?”

It can be and in some quarters it is. Elsewhere, though, for as long as those clicks contribute to revenue, don’t hold your breath.