Many thanks to Socrates 11 sponsors, Football Radar for a fantastic night at the Real Man Bar in London. Great fun was had by all and we are looking forward to holding a further London Socrates event in June to coincide with Euro 2012.
If you would like to organise a Socrates event in your local area, do get in touch. The next event is in Bristol. Click here for more details.
The 11th Socrates Football Bloggers Meet-Up in London will be on 23 March 2012 from 7.00pm in the Real Man Bar, downstairs at 91-95 Clerkenwell Road, London.
The event is kindly sponsored by Football Radar (a few of their faces you may already recognise) who are looking to engage with passionate football followers like us. They’ll be there to chat to on the night but I suggest you also have a look at their website to find out what they’re all about…
New faces are always welcome – come along, it’ll be fun. They’ll be freshly cooked pizzas and beer* courtesy of our sponsors. (*Limited supply – get there early)
Where to go…
If you’re coming, let us know because numbers will be limited – use the form below to guarantee your place:
After the success of Socrates Lewes and Ryton, we are delighted to announce that there will be a third non-league Socrates Football Bloggers Meet Up at Southern League Oxford City for their Premier Division clash with Weymouth on Saturday 28th January.
Socrates Oxford - 28th January
The day will start in the Lamb & Flag pub on St Giles from 12pm onwards. From there, we’ll make our way by taxi to the ground which is located to the north east of the city centre.
The City have a clubhouse; depending on the plans of the bloggers attending we’ll either stop here or make our way back into the city centre for post-match beers.
If you want to attend then drop the event organisers Lloyd Langman and Robert Langham a line at @twounfortunates or thetwounfortunates[at]gmail[dot]com.
The stadium address is:
Court Place Farm Stadium
Marsh Lane, Marston
Oxford
Oxfordshire
OX3 0NQ
Travel details are available here.
The Socrates Survey 2011 is available for download.
The collected views of over 80 football bloggers and podcasters, the survey is the first of its kind amongst the fraternity and provides an insight into the current state of play. As well as asking about workloads and optmism, the survey focuses on the impact of large commercial concerns on a still largely amateur sector.
The raw data (anonymised) is available, on request, to any interested independent football bloggers.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those who contributed.
Socrates is delighted to announce Damon Threadgold and Simon Barnett of The Real FA Cup as winners of the Socrates Award at the Not One Hundred Percent Accurate (NOPA) Awards for football bloggers and podcasters.
Damon and Simon were chosen on the basis of their consistently high quality of reportage and commentary on the early rounds of the English FA Cup. Their work is unique in the football blogosphere and the popularity of the site has, we believe, resulted in an increased popularity and awareness of the preliminary rounds of the FA Cup which in turn has had a positive impact on the attendance at non league grounds. Few football blogs have made a contribution to the grass roots of the game and their site was the only one considered for the 2011 award.
The award was presented to Damon by Gary Andrews at the NOPA Award ceremony on 15th December. A full list of NOPA Award winners is available here.
Socrates would like to thank Picklive for organising the event which was for the benefit of DS Active, providing sporting opportunities for young people with Down’s Syndrome.
In just its second year, the NOPA Awards has quickly become the key date in the diary for football bloggers and podcasters.
Organised by Picklive the awards recognise the very best and are a continuation of Picklive’s involvement and support of bloggers and podcasters. It’s no exaggeration that without the ongoing help from Picklive, Socrates would not be what it is now.
With the likes of Barry Glendenning, Tom Watt, Samantha Johnson and “Jay Jay Okocha” confirmed as special guest award presenters it promises to another great night. If you can, you owe it to yourself to come along and join the party. There are still tickets available.
Event details:
Where: The Urdang, The Old Finsbury Town Hall, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4RP
When: 7pm, Thursday 15 December 2011
As with last year we shall be presenting the Socrates Award for Outstanding Contribution. Selected by the Socrates Panel, this award recognises those who set the standard for us all to strive for. Last year’s award went to Ian King from twohundredpercent.net.
If you are coming, be sure to come and say hello. If you’re in town early why not join me and other bloggers for some pre-event looseners just around the corner from the venue at the Betsey Trotwood, (Map: 56 Farringdon Road). I’ll be in there from 5pm.
The survey is now closed for submissions. Thanks to everyone who helped by adding their opinion.
The report will be published on 15 December 2011.
Update 05/11/11 - This event is now Full!
We are delighted to confirm that Scotland’s first Socrates-Meet Up will be held on Friday the 11th of November. The event will take place at The Golf Lounge in Glasgow and is open to all Football bloggers, podders, tweeters and broadcasters.
The date coincides with the international fixtures and the room will have a game on the TV. It will start at 7pm and we have the room until closing time. The address is
Lower Ground Floor
221 West George Street
Glasgow
G2 2ND
Click here to see this venue on Google Maps.
The venue is ideally located in the centre of town and is easy to get to from both Glasgow’s main train stations and the Buchanan Street Subway. Also for those heading out after, you are close to pubs and clubs.
The room holds forty people so make sure you let us know you can attend. There is a bar and also you can order bar food if you are hungry. The room below is our room for the night minus the boardroom table.
The event is being organised by Scott Johnson of TheFootyBlog Please let him know you are coming by leaving a comment on this web page.
For those of you wanting to spread the word about Socrates (or indeed for those of you that are new to the concept), we’ve produced a new Press Pack document that contains all the details you need in a handy PDF.
Coming in at a commendable 106 kilobytes, it has information for bloggers and sponsors alike about what we do, who we are and what we hope to achieve. Feel free to send it on to anyone you know that’s interested in attending a future event or perhaps wants to sponsor or stage one on our behalf.
Socrates co-founder, Chris Nee has some advice for aspiring football writers.
If you thought Socrates was all beer and chicken balti pies, we’ve got news for you, sucka! With ten-and-some events under our belts, the football blogging community has proven to be a superb source of insight and inspiration as well as ruddy good company. So it’s only right that such advice is collated here and shared with anyone who might find it useful.
We’ll begin with a pertinent subject for many writers who are just starting out in football bloggery: getting published. It sounds somewhat counter-intuitive to present “getting published” as a challenge, given the lack of barriers involved in blogging, but with so many well-known sites out there accepting submissions a guest appearance or two can be a fantastic way to get started.
Of course, getting published on a popular blog site is not easy; neither is knowing how to go about it. Some editors like to be approached with a pitch for an idea, others are happy to take a read of fully-formed articles and make a call on their suitability. Some, of course, don’t want submissions at all.
Discounting the latter of those groups, here is the Socrates guide to not getting published – the irritants and errors that make editors hit the delete button on your emails. Take it from me, we do that a lot.
So, if you want to get posts published, don’t:
Scatter your pitch
It can be tempting to send your pitch or your draft around to as many editors as possible, because it theoretically enhances the chances that someone, somewhere, will pick it up. Trouble is, they can tell. It’s quite clear when a writer has punted their work all over the place and it doesn’t really tick the boxes it needs to tick. We’re a precious bunch sometimes, and we like to think that the people who email us claiming to read/admire/love our sites (I’m not sure where I stand on that, incidentally – I think it might be annoying) have put some thought into where they want their writing to appear.
Of course, nobody would say you should write with a particular blog in mind and then give up if there’s no response. My advice would be to stagger, not scatter. If you get a no, push it somewhere else. But don’t do it willy-nilly.
Contact the wrong editors
Inevitably, scattering your approach results in another faux-pas: talking to the wrong editors. It’s very important to think about which sites are a good fit for your article. If you make sure it goes to the right places, you’ve a better chance of getting your post published and you negate the possibility of narking somebody off.
There’s nothing worse than having to trawl through emails pitching articles about areas of football that just don’t fit. Your work needs to fit into a site, not stick out like a sore thumb. Make it easy for them by emailing the guys whose personal interest might be twigged by your topic.
The solution, of course, is to read the sites you’re approaching. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
Approach it like a job application
“Dear sir, I am writing to enquire…”
No, no, no. I get a lot of these, and while it’s obviously important to be polite and respectful, it exposes a lack of understanding about the world you’re getting into. Football blog editors and authors talk to each other all the time – it’s a community, it’s informal and it is, generally, very welcoming. Say hi, bounce ideas off us and talk to us like humans. The chances are you’re posher than most of the editors anyway, so relax and be cool about it. We don’t bite.*
Nag
We get a lot of emails, and generally we’ll get through them given time. But we mostly have proper jobs, and some of us even have spouses and partners. Getting nagged by prospective writers is beyond irritating and again shows a lack of understanding of the situation on their part. The amount of people who think I get paid for editing twofootedtackle.com is eye-watering. In fact, if they all read the bloody site I probably would do.
So relax. If I don’t reply the first time, I’m sorry. If I don’t reply the second time I’ve deleted your emails because I do this for free and your expectations are unfair and misplaced. If I don’t reply a third time…let’s just say don’t email me a third time.
Write posts that are too long or too short
This one’s very, very simple. Look at the site you’re pitching to, and write articles of a similar length. While it might not seem important, and most of us are so grateful for your work that we’d never proactively impose a word count, it is annoying when something is submitted that is so obviously a different length to the rest of the site’s content. If I tend to publish about 1,000 words at a time, don’t send me 500. And it’s the same the other way round.
The less work we have to do, the better your chances of getting your post published.
Ignore writing conventions
These are always up for debate, and if you really want to do your homework it’s worth having a look round the site you’re pitching to in order to see how they work; the editor’s probably stuck in his or her ways, if there’s anything about them.
Taking my own site as an example, I am very picky about names (full name for first mention, surname thereafter – no silly or fawning nicknames) and numbers (one to ten written out in full, 11 and above as numerals). You will massively improve the chances of your article appearing on a particular site if you observe the conventions they have in place. They’re there for a reason.
Use Microsoft Word. Ever.
Curly quotes must die. If I see a “smart quote” in your work – curly apostrophes included – my blood boils. Blogging in Word is like decorating your living room with crayons: it might be the easy way but it’s lazy and it makes the final product look like sh*t. Find yourself a decent plain text editor (I recommend Notepad++ for Windows users), save your copy as a .txt and send it like that. The cleaner and simpler the submission is, the easier to edit it will be. And that’s only going to work in your favour.
Leave all the work to the editor
The vast majority of editors work for free, and therefore you shouldn’t expect them to polish your turds. If pride isn’t enough to make you proof-read and edit your own work then you probably shouldn’t be doing it at all, but even if you’re not that way inclined then at least consider that if your writing is untidy, poorly structured and awkward to edit, nobody’s going to find a home for it. Besides, I used to get told off for not reading back over my work at primary school. It’s the first rule.
Remarkably some writers are more than happy to contact an editor, ask if they’re interested in taking some work, and then ask what they should write about. Er… *DELETE*
So, there’s the handy and somewhat sarcastic guide to getting your work published. Of course, these are not hard and fast rules but a list of ideals compiled based on my own opinion and some anecdotal input from the trio of loveliness that is the IBWM editorial team. But if you follow all of the above you will increase your chances of making it on to most sites.
* Some of us bite.
Chris Nee is the editor of the Two Footed Tackle website