There's also the factor that there are editors who are ideologically opposed to firearms in any form in their section of the newspaper (Malachy Logan in the Times comes to mind fairly fast). And that factor is often compounded by the belief that not many people will buy the paper to read about "minority sports" (even though those sports have more actual participants than four out of the Big Five).

I do wonder quite a bit if we'd see that change if we took a page from ICABS' manual and wrote to our local papers quite a lot more often as individuals. I don't think the NGBs can turn it around on their own; it's too much work for too few people. You really do need to have three or four people doing nothing but PR on the national level to keep up, because while one person could handle the work on a slow day midweek, when you have a match on the weekends or with an international match, you have too many places to contact at the same time. Everyone's deadline lands at the same time, everyone wants their own unique copy, and half the time everyone wants someone on their radio show at the same time. Not to mention that someone has to go take photos and get the results because few, if any, clubs have their own local PRO to help out (at best, it's usually something along the lines of "erra, sure Jimmy can manage that, along with his usual job of being chief range officer and secretary"). And somehow you have to get those photos back from the wilds in a usable form, which normally meant having a laptop and a 3G dongle onsite with the PRO, who had to know how to frame a photo, download it to the laptop and do minor editing in photoshop or gimp or whatever, and then email or ftp it over to the paper in their preferred format and resolution (and that was usually a very high resolution for print, which at the time used to mean reasonably expensive equipment).

Bananaman wrote: »

But you can try ...........

And we did, after the dismissal we got. And we were making progress the last time I looked. But we were still getting the half-inch of column space that needed filling every so often. The editor's influence isn't easily sidestepped.

If a paper does not print your story that is their prerogative, however, if you do not send them the story because 'last time they treated me with disdain' you have no excuse.

We never, ever, did that. We sent them everywhere we could - but most of the time, editors went with covering Tiger Woods' latest club head warmers or something of that nature.

The best approach is to send them a newsbite+photo every time there is a newsbite.

Which is what we did, consistently, for several years (and I think we're still doing it, I'm just not the one doing it anymore).

Same with the Digest - like it or not it is the Irish shooting publication - I am sure any sports editor worth his salt will take a nosey at it to see if it is covering the 'very important sport' in question that he has just received a newsbite on and a email from his editor asking him if he can do anything to get this feckin monkey off his back.

And that's a problem for us a lot of the time. It's hard enough getting past an uninformed editor's preconceptions of a sport he or she knows nothing about; it's far far harder when they've seen something particularly dodgy-looking like some of the Digest's articles over the years. There's good stuff in there occasionally (Joe Keane's articles were often good reads for example), but trying to get someone to cover an air rifle international match when their mental image of your sport is of bayonet collecting is enormously difficult to do.

You may think that the Olympic disciplines carry enough pedigree to warrant coverage in the National Broadhseets

I do, because of the coverage and interaction we've had at all the previous Olympic games. The challange is extending that outside of those timeframes.

I know there's prejudice against it in some quarters of our community, but the simple fact is, the Olympic nametag carries a lot of weight outside of our community and our ignoring that tool in the toolbox is the worst case of cutting off our nose to spite our face you could think of.

you need to start at grass roots specialist publications and work your way out.

No, you need to start at grass roots generalist publications like your local paper. Local papers have little in the way of content and resources, so they're happy to publish local stories. If local clubs were pushing that resource continually, we'd start feeding into the larger newspapers a lot more because those newspapers do monitor the local papers in order to figure out who'll buy what (ad revenue is an enormous commercial pressure, but it's not like we can never use it to our advantage).