APB: The biggest question we had was the perception or otherwise in the local media – and I think its particularly recognisable that since relegation the Tykes have disappeared off the BBCs map completely, and that’s kind of disappointing especially when you’re trying to build a crowd up and build a profile. What are your views on that and what you guys can do to change it?

PD: To be honest that has been the case. The BBC in particular given their high level coverage while we were in the Premiership have scaled down to virtually zero coverage this season. We’ve been plugging away; we make available to them every Monday all the tries of each game, so that they know its available. We drop tapes off for them to use. This week we supplied the Doncaster tries off to them – you know the footage that Giles takes . We have a great ally for the club in Paul Heggarty who reports for Radio Leeds. And Paul’s pushing for us and of course we’re pushing, but Derm Tanner from a Radio Leeds point of view doesn’t see National Division 1 rugby as being part of their listenership. What I would say is that we hammer away every week, and we send them press releases and make Stuart Lancaster available to them every week. The BBC is a public service broadcaster, so if fans were to put pressure on them – you know emails, letters etc – they have to respond to what the listeners and viewers want  as they are a public service broadcaster. There’s only so much we can push their way – and we make Stuart available to them every week and regular press releases. If you look at the lads from Yorkshire Radio, they get the same opportunities and they take them…. 

APB: That was quite interesting because until Yorkshire Radio appeared on the messageboard a few weeks ago I’d certainly never heard of them, and now they’ve made a niche for themselves. They’ve pulled us on side and we help to promote them now because they’re promoting something we’re interested in…. 

PD: They send someone to every game, they send match reports and do interviews. The lad who does it has a really good relationship with Stuart now and has a chat after each game. And that’s an example that we make the opportunities available but those lads from Yorkshire Radio have resourced it. I know Ken Bates isn’t that popular down the road, but he’s financed that radio station and those lads are going out and making it something for all the people of Leeds. And that’s great. My suspicion is that if and when we get back into the Premiership everyone whose been hibernating for a year will come back on board. Because we used to have press opportunities every week and Radio Aire, Real Radio and Radio Leeds were there every week without fail. And this year unfortunately no matter how hard we push them, they don’t see it as part of their sports coverage. We speak to them – its not just a question of sending out emails – we phone them up and offer different angles and target specific games. We targetted the Otley game for example with a different angle. We have been successful on occasions, but its not something that’s just a perception – the coverage has dropped off, it’s a reality. Another example is that the Evening Post has had a reporter at two games this season. The main paper based in Leeds, two games this season. Everything else has been supplied by myself.  That gives you an idea. 

APB: So a lot of this has been making your job harder then. You’ll have been working much harder just to stay still? 

PD: Exactly! I’ve had people say to me “you won’t have so much to do this year, not being in the Premiership”. Actually its three, four times as much to do this year just to keep at that level. We’re doing stuff that no one else in this division is doing. In terms of national media – I don’t know if they just hit delete and don’t read it or what ever but it gets to them. And occasionally you get times when you can think creatively and take advantage with a different angle. For example in the third round of the EDF Anglo-Welsh cup there were a lot of dead rubbers in the third round – I knew this from last year – and to be honest the press aren’t really that interested in that cup anyway. We played Pirates that weekend, so on the Monday I sent out a release around "a top-of-the-table clash, see how the Tykes are getting on in National 1" etc., and we got three or four good articles that weekend. Because they need to fill the papers with something so sometimes you can get them to bite at these.

Another example was when a lot of games got frozen off in the new year, and we were playing Plymouth. And because we have good facilities here and they know that, they’ll come here more often than not. We had a big piece in the Times that weekend. If they have a choice between Doncaster, Sedgley Park, Rotherham or us, they’ll come to us because they know we have excellent press facilities here. For most of our games we’ve had me and two or three others in the press box, but you keep the same standard and the same facilities – we give out programmes and team sheets and everything. We want to maintain a high standard so the press will use it. 

APB: LeedsRugby recently published the feedback from LTSA’s evening with Stuart Lancaster night, and it was striking that Sam Wheeler was listed by someone in the SWOT analysis as a threat! 

PD: Sam was actually in the room that night, so I don’t know whether he was being ultra self-critical or even tipping us off he WAS a threat! 

APB: (laughs). The other thing that drew my eye was the set of weaknesses here. Ten people said “Bad Advertising/Marketing”. Six people said “Lack of media profile”. “TV coverage Look North/Calendar”. How does that affect you – I mean, are you thinking “I’ve got a PR job to do with the fans, let alone the press”, or are you thinking “actually they might have a point” – so what’s your angle on that? 

PD: You’ve always got to look at your operation and ask yourself are we doing everything we could do with the resources we’ve got? I mean I could spend all my time trying to get us in the Telegraph, the Times,  onto the BBC Six O’Clock News, but it would be a waste of time. Are my resources better spent building a relationship with the deputy editor of the evening post saying look here’s some copy I’ll phone it through. He knows it’s good stuff and he can publish without worrying about it. So is my time better spent there? I’d say yes. But people are right to talk about a lack of media profile this season because there is. Unfortunately the vast majority of it is beyond our control and we hopefully maximise the exposure we do get. But we can certainly learn stuff. I’ve been here ten years this month, but if I said “I know it all I can’t be taught anything” I'd be kidding myself. For example I always talk to new players to find out what was done at their old clubs to learn more. You can always learn.  Part of it is borne out of ignorance in that people generally don’t always know what we do. Another part of it is trying to get feedback from people and what their ideas are. For example on that night the gentleman asked about the Development XV fixtures not being published. That was a fair point. I previously had problems with the development coaches who were a bit vague on when the fixtures were and it became a bit of a hassle to get concrete information, so it was easier to concentrate on the first team. But after that question I knew I could fix it so I pinned Lanny and Diccon down and we got a fixture list published the following day. There are certain things that, unless someone says to you out loud “couldn’t you do that?” then it doesn’t get done. So its good to get feedback like that. 

APB: I think there’s a human nature thing here in that people don’t often comment on things that are right, only things that are wrong. And when you see there’s, for example, a perception that we’re not getting enough media coverage and draw the false conclusion that no one’s working hard enough to get it out there. In the sense that you could think that all you have to do is push the content to people. Put you’ve already said that it doesn’t matter how much you push it, sometimes it goes in the bin. And so I think there’s an education to be had for us which I hope this interview will go some way towards addressing.   

PD:  I’ve just sent out the team sheet and Tykes Talk for this week, and seconds later I had releases from five or six of the Guinness Premiership clubs with their lists – I’m still on the GP mailing list, and I don’t think many of the other ND1 clubs send stuff out like that – but it got me thinking that, yeah, we’re competing for space against these teams, plus "Jonny Wilkinson’s latest comeback", plus "will the England players come through this weekends GP matches fit?" So we have to make the most of the opportunities arising. I've checked the fixtures in April and the Rotherham game will probably be the biggest game that weekend –  there’ll be a lot of "dead rubbers" in the Premiership, vying for fourth place etc. The big one could be a relegation decider, but even then they’ll probably double up with the team going up as well as the team going down. So we have planned ahead for an opportunity to present itself there.  It is a human nature thing I appreciate that. I did have to laugh that someone posted about the Pirates game that it was “a disgrace that only 800 people were there. I didn’t go to the game but it was a disgrace!” Well hang on!  

APB: (laughs). Talking about the “800” Pirates game – and I’m talking out of ignorance a bit here because I didn’t see the coverage – but apparently on Sky’s Rugby Club where they seemed to go on about –  the only thing they seem to talk about as far as Leeds is concerned – the crowd numbers.. How do we get them off that hoary old subject and get them to talk more about the players? The players are doing damn well this season and I think they deserve better than that! 

PD: The thing with Rugby Club is that its normally in 30 seconds once a week. They decided to do a bigger piece on that game and we made both Stuarts available for them. What they try to do is make Rugby Club opinionated and so because they haven’t seen our players this year they have to pick something that they can see on paper. Crowd numbers it is! From our time in the Premiership we have a really good relationship with the reporters on the Rugby Club who come up and see us a number of times. As far as Stuart Barnes and Dewi Morris are concerned they’re there for the soundbite, but I know for a fact that they’re really keen to see us come back up; there’s no negativity towards Leeds at all they’re really keen to have us back. If they looked at a piece of paper and saw, say Biggsy scored, and led a piece with “Biggs continues his good form from last year” we’d have said “hold on, he’s been injured for a lot of this season! They’re talking rubbish!”. So they could get caught out like that. So you see a crowd figure and that’s a fact that you can’t be caught out on. So that’s the angle. But as I said the Sky organisation in terms of their reporters etc. are really keen to see us back. I don’t think that comment had any malice intended. And of course its true! We DO need to get the crowd figures up.  

APB: This is always the problem isn’t it? You can end up getting quite defensive about picking on a negative aspect like that, but they’re negative aspects that are there and real, and sometimes its difficult to counter that.  Looking through the questions we had raised, we had a question about the lack of coverage in the Bradford press. Do you feel that in general that because its Leeds Tykes rather than, say, Yorkshire Tykes there’s a problem there? Do you feel that the press looks at Tykes news items and say “that’s the Yorkshire Post’s area and we won’t go near it” ? 

PD: I think yes and no. Without being too flippant about it, the Tykes are news when it suits them. For example when we had the cup win, a large number of people phoned up talking about “our team” etc. But it is an area we need to work on and we tend to focus through the community programme to try to break into those areas. The summer camps will help there because we're already going into the local area. So we'll we say we’ve got a camp running, John Bentley and some of the players are there and we’re running a competition then the papers will pick it up, but if we say we’ve got a game at the weekend against Cornish Pirates – then they’re not interested. So we try to target them through the community. And we are fighting a battle there to establish ourselves. The club is only fourteen years old, and only been the Tykes since 1998. So there is going to be a time lag to it. We have made massive strides since I first came here, but it would be nice if the Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield press would cover us more. Again, talking about maximising opportunities, the Hull press is case in point in that we did a piece with them using Biggsy and Vicks and Murph when he was here. Occasionally they will do a piece maybe once a season, but they’re not in a position to do match previews and reviews every week.  

APB: That would be the target though wouldn’t it? 

PD: Definitely. If we had a huge advertising budget and said we would advertise a lot in your paper then I’m sure they’d be a lot more condusive to it. Unfortunately we don’t have a budget for that, and that’s pretty much the only way you can force a paper’s hand.  In terms of local newspapers, the Evening Post is effectively the official paper of Leeds Rugby. This year they've made cutbacks at their end. Dave Craven when he was there was brilliant for us – he was the rugby union correspondent. Now Nick Wood who was the cricket correspondent and he has now picked up the Tykes as well. Nick doesn’t do games so most of the match reports come from myself. Match previews come from myself, Reaction from Stuart comes from myself. So that’s how we have to work this year. Hopefully when we’re back in the Premiership the Tykes will once again become a priority for them and they can put some money into it. But again, we try to maximise the opportunities. For example when Andre came I gave that as an exclusive to the Yorkshire Post.  People knock Sam Wheeler and we’ve had words down the years – he’s a very strong willed young man – but to be fair to him, in terms of coverage he’s been top! You may not like his opinion, but he’s always there at every game.  

APB: I think that’s what comes out of our questions that it wasn’t so much that Sam wasn’t there, but we didn’t like his opinions. I guess we’re perhaps guilty of seeing the games sometimes through rose-tinted spectacles as well as him seeing them through …. glasses of a different colour! 

PD: But it’s the old one – you might not like his opinion, but at least he’s got one! You have to appreciate that in terms of the Tykes – it’s a different philosophy from the Rhinos – but for the Tykes the Yorkshire Post is a massive newspaper for us. So its never a case of not talking to Sam, we do constantly talk to him and say “you’ve been a bit unfair there!”. Sam will come back and say “I was right!” but he probably won’t do it again. In terms of relationship that’s how we try and work it.  Some of the stuff we get put in the Yorkshire Evening Post for the Rhinos – ticket news etc – people might say “why don’t we get that for the Tykes in the YP?”.  That’s never going to happen because of the nature of the Yorkshire Post and how they see themselves. They see themselves as a national newspaper based in Yorkshire. They see themselves as the equivalent of the Telegraph that just happens to be printed in Leeds. So we maximise our coverage. The thing we gave them with Andre was an exclusive, we knew they would use that as a high profile piece with lots of coverage. And they did! 

APB: You mentioned that the philosophy is different between Rhinos and Tykes. I noticed coming in through the door you’ve won an award from the Engage Super League for Best Media and Communications 2006. What briefly is that different philosophy, and why is it different? 

PD: In terms of the Yorkshire Post, we want to go county wide. For rugby league, the Yorkshire Post is covering four Super League teams and another six in National 1. Hopefully if the Tykes can get back in the Premiership we can rightfully say we’re Yorkshire’s no. 1 rugby union side and that makes it much easier. Sam Wheeler made it very clear to us before the season started that he will cover Otley, Rotherham and Doncaster just as much as us and give us no preferential treatment just because we’ve been in the Premiership. That’s fine, but at least we keep giving them copy that they can use if they’re not getting it from elsewhere.  In terms of dealing with the press generally, there’s only a different philosophy with the local press, in that the Yorkshire Evening Post has a full time RL correspondent who has to put stuff in the paper every night. If he doesn’t get it from us he can get it from Wakefield or Bradford or wherever. So that’s the main difference. The things like weekly chats with coaches are exactly the same. We put out "Tykes Talk" for the Tykes, "Headingley Carnegie Insight" for the Rhinos, we try to have five new stories every day for both websites – not always possible but we try – so its pretty much the same philosophy really. I suppose it’s a back handed compliment that no one mentions it, but we’re very proud of the matchday programme. That comes out of the media and PR department, for both. And for the Rhinos we got Programme of the Year for four years running and then they stopped awarding it….. 

APB: It was getting embarrassing? …. 

PD: …and the Tykes got Programme of the Year when we were in the Premiership. And so we’re very proud of that and perhaps as you say its human nature to knock negatives rather than praise positives. There was no way we were going to let our programme go this year, and we worked hard to make sure we maintained a quality product. I really like the product we’ve got this year. We had to bring the number of pages down, but we still managed to get a lot of information there.  

APB: I know that’s appreciated. My daughter’s started coming with me this year and she loves it – getting the posters out of the middle and sticking them on the wall, filling in the scorecard during the games etc. And I think it’s a great thing. I’d like to ask you now about the Pirates cup game and its rescheduling. There was a lot of fuss caused when the game was announced to be the Sunday, then it moved to Saturday and then again to Friday. From what I saw of that and from my point of view, it seemed to be handled impeccably – you announced what you knew when you knew it. The Pirates fans did seem to worry a lot about how that was handled. So do you think you did that the best way you could? 

PD: Its funny, sometimes you ask people what they want, you give it to them, and then it turns out it isn’t what they want! That’s a bit flippant, but from the Evening With Lanny, one of the things I took away was people were asking “why do we have to hear about things elsewhere? Why are the club keeping things secret? Why don’t they tell us what’s going on?”. So when the draw was made, I checked with the powers that be at our place. The calendar for the stadium had the Sunday free, we were the home side, we’d been told by the RFU that it’s the home side’s prerogative, so we announced Sunday 2.30pm. So I put it out on the website subject to confirmation from the Pirates. The Pirates came back and said “you can’t play on a Sunday it has to be the Saturday”. So there was some debate. We didn’t want to play on the Saturday because our core support comes from people who play the game or are involved in local clubs – Bentos is a perfect example there. Our fans tend to have a local club and Leeds is their professional club. But we reluctantly said OK to Saturday, but gave our reasons why we didn’t like it. And then they suggested the Friday and we prefer Fridays to Saturdays, so we agreed to that and announced the game to be on the Friday. But we were trying to keep people informed as and when we knew it.  I had someone from the Pirates’ fan site contact me asking me to stay in touch because of the confusion. I said that they needed to get an answer from the Pirates as to why they didn’t want to play on a Sunday – their normal game day. 

APB: And I think to be fair they got that answer loud and clear – and didn’t like it either! Just to feedback to you that it came loud and clear to me that you announced things when you had stuff to announce, and I think no one could ask any more of you for that.  

PD: If this had happened before the Evening With Lanny, what I might have done would have been to wait a bit just to see if anything happens – because these things do happen sometimes, but 9 times out of 10 you announce the Sunday and the game would be played on the Sunday. But I was conscious that after that evening people had said “why do you keep it a big secret?” so what I tried to do is to be slightly less cautious than I have been guilty of before and that the 9 out of 10 times it would’ve been OK. 

APB: I think there’s a general feeling that what you did then was the right thing and we’re very appreciative that we knew as quickly as possible what was going on – albeit that changed a couple of times – but we knew what was going on when you did. And I think everyone is much happier with that scenario. 

PD: It was the same with the Tynedale game. Because we could’ve had a whole week where we would be going “check tomorrow” to see if the wind dies down and we can do the work on the stand. But so everyone knows what we’re doing we checked Tynedale were agreeable to the venue change, we were agreeable so lets tell everyone so they can plan around it. I did notice someone asked how many games I’ve been to. I’ve been to 21 out of 25 games this year. I missed four at the start of the year. And I went to 28 out of 31 last year. Including a snowy Calvisano – I was there so I’m counting that one! So its very rare I miss a game. I cover all games home and away for both Rhinos and Tykes. Where theres a clash of fixtures then the home fixture take precedence – since there’s more to do there than an away game. Last year I was at the Sale game doing live match updates and the Rhinos were at Wigan that day, and I had Radio Leeds in my ear doing live match updates for the Rhinos. That was a bit tricky! There were a couple of times that’s happened. But in those cases the more important match takes precedence; that day it was the Rhinos second game of the season, and the Sale game for the Tykes was vital so I was at that one.  Talking of live score updates, we are the only club that give live updates in either the Premiership or ND1. The other week I put an apology on that I couldn’t get a signal and updated the site as soon as I got to the press box on a land line. I had to laugh when some guy posted that we didn’t care and that it was no good saying that then, why didn’t I post it before the game? … Because I couldn’t get a signal!! 

APB: Some people are born to whinge I’m afraid! Final question: What information is sent out to the press, and who are the press organisations targetted? 

PD: Every email goes to 130 members of the press, including the Mirror, the Independent all the nationals, all the way down to the Telegraph and Argus in Bradford. They go pretty much everywhere  – YTV, Look North etc. Everyone gets it. On a match day we pass out team sheets, programmes etc, and we do a statistics sheet as well for those visitors who don't know the team so well. 

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