Manchester Evening Post’s fake news pledge and Arsenal spin in the Mirror

Forget all that Clickbait balls and Transfer Balls and all the other balls designed to seduce football fans to click on the ads. The Manchester Evening News is going factual. It might be contagious and impact on other titles owned by Trinity Mirror. This is the MEN’s mission statement:

Sport, like news, is a perpetual motion machine. The pace of change is increasingly rapid, not just on the pitch but in the press box too.

After all, what is a sports journalist in 2017? Outstanding bloggers interrogate coaches at press conferences, long-loved fanzines have gone digital, reaching millions of readers every year and supporters are turning the cameras on themselves; democratising the games we love and presenting an unprecedented landscape to traditional media outlets.

Supporters and lovers of sport crave authenticity. To be a fan is to join a community, to share a common language that transcends accents or post codes. It is our job, as the regional experts around our clubs and personalities, to generate and reflect these communities and their conversations every day.

To be trusted by the people who go to games and know our teams inside out is a great privilege. Plenty changes in sport, but that remains the same. When you see a sea of headlines about your club, looking out for the title based closest to the club in question in the best way to ensure you’re getting the real story from your clubs.

Why? Because we don’t just report on our clubs, we live and work amongst its fans too. It’s a matter of trust.

We know what fans want because we are them ourselves. But we also know that fans want facts – no matter how much we’d all want to believe that Ronaldo is about to sign for our club. That’s what sets us apart from those organisations who just want your click. We want your trust.

Good for them. Fans of Manchester United and Manchester City will get the facts and only the facts.news: ”

In 0ther MEN news: “‘Have Manchester United dropped transfer hints about the futures of De Gea and Rooney?”

Answer: No.

Meanwhile, over at MEN stablemate the Daily Mirror, the top story online (at the time of writing) is “JOHN CROSS: Wenger out? A shakeup is imminent and he could still leave Arsenal this summer – there are various factors at play.”

Could leave?

Can this be the same john Cross who told Mirror readers that Wenger is “STAYING” at Arsenal and…