Mark Douglas speaks to The Mag – Great interview | OneFootball

Mark Douglas has been The Northern Football Correspondent for the i newspaper for the last three years.

Prior to that he covered Newcastle United at The Journal and the Chronicle for 13 years.

Mark Douglas sat down with Mag writer David Punton to give his views on all things Newcastle United.

Our thanks to Mark for giving his time to do this.

How big a season do you think this is, in terms of for Newcastle United on and off the pitch, needing to convince key players such as Isak, Bruno and Gordon that their longer-term futures should be at St James’ Park?

I think we’ll look back at 2024 as the year when the reality of the PIF/Reubens takeover hit home a little bit.

The PSR issues, the difficulty breaking into an established elite, the limitations of what Newcastle’s squad can do and the sheer size of the gap Ashley left the club with have all become more apparent and it’s felt a slightly depressing 12 months at times.

The happy part of that is 2025, I think, will bring a bit more optimism: the stadium project should finally get the green light, one of the huge losses drops off the PSR calculations and revenue streams are expanding – so I’d expect a better year.

Mistakes have been made this year – plenty of them – but they’ve largely held their nerve and that’s a good thing. Eddie Howe is the best thing to happen to the club from a managerial perspective for years and years.

In terms of those players, I think they’re committed. Bruno and Gordon’s long-term deals remove some of the worry and while Isak clearly needs to be playing Champions League football soon, I think the sort of money he’s asking for in terms of extending his deal isn’t easy to find. So I’d think all three of them will still be here in 12 months’ time. Sales may come from elsewhere, though.

What do you think is the best way forward for Newcastle United, a brand new stadium if it can be built in Leazes Park/Castle Leazes (not out of town!) or redeveloping St James’ Park as best they can?

If they can knock down St James’ Park and rebuild on the same site – like Spurs did – then that is the best option for me. But that would be hugely pricey and I’m not sure it is possible given the land constraints.

St James’ Park has history and soul and I love the place. But I’ve always felt a new stadium – in the right place, state of the art and with the technology, seats and architectural know-how of someone who realises they’re building something for many, many generations – might be the right way forward. I’m lucky enough to have been in the new Everton stadium and it really is a wonder. Imagine what Newcastle could do with a clean slate.

In five years time, what is your best guess of the location where Newcastle United will be playing and what capacity that stadium will have?

It has to be a guess because there’s so many variables but I’ve spoken to a lot of architects, surveyors and stadium experts in the last three years and I think it’ll be somewhere close to the current site – perhaps the arena site, if they can secure it – and the capacity would be around 68,000 with room to expand. While they could probably fit in more, keeping it as a ‘hot ticket’ with a relatively scarce supply is important too. Make it 80,000 and you have the Man City problem for games that aren’t as attractive, and then you have to discount tickets and a whole new problem…

What do you consider the biggest Newcastle United scoop you have had, outdoing other NUFC journalists?

I’ll let others decide on that one! It’s a great pack so any exclusive news story you get you’ve worked really, really hard to beat some brilliant journalists to.

Not necessarily a scoop in the traditional sense but my favourite Newcastle piece of the last year was an in-depth piece on the academy. I spent a few days interviewing people and a day actually at the facility, just speaking to people, touring the place and observing stuff and the end result was really satisfying.

Which Newcastle United piece do you wish you had never written?

Pick any of the many, many takeover pieces pre-2019.

There were a lot of time wasters who emerged when Ashley put the club up for sale and a lot of trees felled (both in terms of newspaper print and metaphorically online) writing about them for the local titles as there was so much interest.

A summer reporting on Bin Zayed Group – even if it was always caveated with some scepticism – was a bit of a low. I’m still not sure how they got so far in the process.

When a club such as Newcastle United can now communicate directly with their fanbase in so many different ways, plus NUFC now does stuff like allowing fans to watch pre-match press conferences live. What is the future for NUFC media, if any? Why do the club and/or fans need the media? What would we lose if outside the club NUFC media was no longer there?

Good question: journalism has changed so much in the last 10 years it’s now nothing like the profession I got into and absolutely unrecognisable from the Chronicle of the 90s, when it was the only game in town.

One thing doesn’t change: if I can tell you (the reader) something you didn’t know then I’m still relevant. So the job of a journalist is still to offer insight – whether that’s breaking a story the club can’t (because in-house media is still the voice of the club, so they have to be careful about what they write/broadcast) or offering analysis they never would or speaking to people they wouldn’t.

We have independence and it’s our job to find that stuff so I think we still add a lot. And many of us have been doing it for decades, so we’ve built up a contact base that gives us the ability to know where to go when big stories break.

I love fan media and think it’s been the most important step forward for the profession. We’re no long sitting on high telling readers what to read – or regurgitating boring press conferences or hiving off 20 different, stale lines from player interviews – so we have to be sharper and more credible than ever.

What would you lose? Independent voices. And that’d be a massive shame.

Has your job been made easier or more difficult by the October 2021 takeover?

It has been made much, much, much more interesting.

There’s so much to write now, so much enthusiasm from fans, intrigue about what they’re doing and who the owners are. The club are more receptive to an extent and luckily there’s some very good people up there who can now communicate – pre-2021 it didn’t matter if there were good news stories because Ashley’s continuing presence was the narrative and it sullied everything.

No one wanted to read about a mid-table Newcastle just doing enough. But this new version – people want to read about it. Even those who stridently object to Saudi involvement want to talk about it.

What has changed for better and worse, purely in terms of the job since that moment?

For better: the interest and excitement. We’ve been to Milan, Dortmund and Paris in the Champions League – things I never thought I’d see pre-2021. Sports editors care, fans care and there are so many stories now. It had gone terribly flat before then.

For worse? We have to be experts on geo-politics, accounting and football regulations now. The game is about so much more than 90 minutes. I quite like that but at times, as you’re speaking to your umpteenth lawyer about associated parties transactions, you do wonder what happened to the beautiful game…

Talking of fans, many journalists covering football are desperate for people not to know who they support, what’s your view on that (as a Bradford fan)?

I guess it’s easier for me as the team I follow isn’t a rival (as much as I cling on to a 2-0 Valley Parade win over a very good Newcastle team in 1999). If you were a Newcastle fan covering Sunderland it’s not a great look I suppose.

But generally it’s something the readers can relate to. We’re all fans so we have to think like it when we write to an extent – what would I want to know about my club?

If you are from outside the region, what are the positives and negatives of that, when it comes to covering Newcastle United?

I was actually born in the North East – although spent most of my life before moving back in Yorkshire – so I had a little bit of knowledge of the region and football’s important place in it, which was important. I think being able to look at things from a slightly detached perspective isn’t a bad thing as long as you plug into the club.

In my job I also cover other clubs in the north and it’s much, much harder to do that if you don’t live or immerse yourself in them. It takes that bit more time to understand what the issues are and what fans want to read – although I feel I’m getting there with some of the other clubs on my patch.

If you could press a magic button, would you choose to go back to the days of old school journalism, with no social media, no internet, no multimedia journalism?

Well I had little taste of it when I first started in journalism and there were bits of it that were great, not least the fact newspapers sold in such big numbers and brands like the Journal carried huge weight. But honestly, I think journalism now is sharper and better for social media and being more audience-focused.

Of course there are bits I don’t like – clickbait, the profession’s decade-long existential crisis, job cuts – but I feel a heck of a lot closer to the readers now.

How difficult do you find it to gauge what the Newcastle United fanbase is feeling at any particular moment in time, with the likes of social media so often distorting things with a small but vocal minority maybe making it appear that certain views are held more widely, than is the reality?

I like social media but I don’t take it too seriously, and anyone who reads it an hour or two after the final whistle of a defeat should be aware they’re getting a very distorted view of events! What it is great for is collating the issues that fans are talking about or the questions they are asking.

It has been useful to see the growth of BlueSky (you can follow Mark on BlueSky HERE) of late. It definitely feels more like Twitter did back in the day: a more reasonable, rational version talking shop than X has become recently.

What would you say to anybody who is now at school or college and is dreaming of a career in journalism?

Don’t do it, I don’t need the competition! Seriously though, it’s a fantastic job and I would thoroughly recommend it – but it’s difficult to get into, the money is poor when you start and you’re getting into a profession that is trying to work out what it’s all about in real time at the moment.

My advice now would be to find a niche or get really knowledgeable about something you’re passionate about, whether that’s tactics, a particular overseas league that is under represented, academy football, sports law or the business of football. Then build yourself a brand on social media, YouTube, TikTok… it’s a great starting point. I once gave a job to someone at the Chronicle because he’d started a combat sports website while still at uni and I felt that showed initiative. I’m delighted to report he’s done really well in football journalism and is still going strong!

Five NUFC people (managers, players, directors, whoever) that you have most enjoyed interviewing?

Demba Ba – fascinating character, deeper thinker than I ever imagined.

Dan Burn (such a great bloke – and what a story).

Rafa Benitez (you’d go in for a quick local journalists’ briefing and he would pin you down for three hours talking football).

Amanda Staveley (because it was on the day the takeover happened and suddenly Newcastle was full of possibility).

Steve Harper (always great, always honest).