Oliver Sparrow and Eric Beard had the pleasure of spending an hour with esteemed author and journalist Jonathan Wilson on the AFR Podcast. Jonathan writes for The Guardian, The Independent, Sports Illustrated, World Soccer, and FourFourTwo. He is also the editor of a quarterly publication called The Blizzard, which is filled with content from some of the biggest names in football journalism.

Barney's Version
Armed with some rubbish questions from EFW and some gems of her own, Lizzy Ammon clicked the heels of her favourite pair of red shoes together three times before marching off to meet Guardian sports journalist Barney Ronay...
Thanks for taking time away from Guardian Towers to talk to us.

Barney's Version
Armed with some rubbish questions from EFW and some gems of her own, Lizzy Ammon clicked the heels of her favourite pair of red shoes together three times before marching off to meet Guardian sports journalist Barney Ronay...
Thanks for taking time away from Guardian Towers to talk to us.

Mac the Life
Lizzy Ammon caught up with journalist, Football Manager addict and Southend United fan Iain Macintosh.
LA: Hi Macca, thanks for taking time away from playing Football Manager to talk to us. This might prove to be one of the most testing interviews you've ever done in your life.

I remember talking about the Carling Cup carnival one year ago after a 4-0 victory against Newcastle, a match in which we were ruthlessly efficient in the second half after being handed a lucky lead in the first; a Bendtner curler and two Walcott one-on-ones giving the scoreline much gloss and splendour as we lovingly clutched the CCQF Cup to our bosom and went through to the last eight.

I'm back, and I'm more disillusioned than ever. Now to start my rant I give you the number 22. You see 22 is a bullshit number. On the show Most Evil, for example, a forensic psychiatrist scales from 1 to 22, evilness is mentally evaluated – thus making 22 the most evil. Then you have Catch-22, which doesn't help anyone.

Pat's Win Prizes Patrick Collins has been the chief sports writer of the Mail on Sunday since the newspaper's launch in 1982, writes Adam Bate. He has won the prestigious SJA Sports Writer of the Year award five times across three different decades. Thanks for talking to EFW. As we speak, the Premier League has just got up and running again.

Sunshine Of The North We live in an age where everyone is a de-facto journalist; social media allows for that, especially Twitter, writes Andy Hudson. While many full-time journalists take stick via mediums such as Twitter and forums, with many people quick to believe that they could do better than those employed by newspapers, there are a number of reporters that excel at what they do.

Written by dandan

I did a run round of the blogs on Friday and was dismayed to see the amount of poison being directed at Samir Nasri.

Now I have no brief for Nasri in particular, other than he can play a bit and is still an Arsenal player. To read the blogs you would think he was public enemy number one.

Holt. Who goes there.... We all know Oliver Holt. We've followed him on twitter, we've read his columns and we've all got his opinions on him. We might criticise him, we might disagree with him, but you've got to give the guy credit for sticking his opinions out there and, like all the best folks on twitter, he's prepared to engage with those who disagree with him, and often to notable effect.

I know. I missed a few things.
Mostly the launch of the Blizzard, what that meant for football blogging and whether it heralded a new page in football journalism, which I hope to talk about in the coming days.
As I hope you've been aware, I've been writing daily posts for The Score's Footy Blog, which has been an incredibly useful discipline.

...and go buy Issue #1 of The Blizzard. It's a pay-what-you-like model, and I was suspicious of the £3 (~$5) suggested price for the ePub. But I'm a big fan of Jonathan Wilson, so I took the plunge and feel richly rewarded for doing so, both in the quantity and the quality of the work included. A nice stack of non-time-sensitive soccer/football journalism now sits on my phone, just waiting for those little gaps in the day to appear.

James Shaw has lost the plot again but he has a heart-felt message for all to read...Honestly it's in there somewhere...

The ever present flashing line teases you with a poignant sense of void. You type a few words and read it back and it means nothing to you.

AC Milan Blog has an exciting announcement to make. World Football Daily, a large American based football website with over thirty thousand readers per month that has had world famous names in football journalism such as Martin Tyler and Kris Voakes contribute, is now presenting material from AC Milan Blog's own, Franky T.

A job in fitba'?
What could be better.
I'm holding out for George Peat's job myself. If you think that dictatorial dinosaur is bad wait till you see how the tyrannical Tyrannosaurus rolls.
Convinced football is your calling?
JobsFootball.co.uk is a good place to start:
One of the keys to being a successful and productive employee is to be motivated.

The Incredible Caulk
For years the North East was described as a football hotbed. Given the recent lack of major success for our football clubs many fans from outside the region would suggest a sickbed would be a more befitting comparison. But football is still thriving on Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside - and at the forefront of that is our football reporting.

Nearly two years ago, the Daily Mail's Matt Lawton published a piece under what should surely be considered one of the most dunderheaded headlines in recent football journalism: "The best players of the world (and Xavi): Ronaldo crowned king of football." In the wake of Cristiano Ronaldo's ascension as the world player of the year in 2009, Lawton took the time to cheekily ridicule Xavi Hernández, a player whose patience, measure, and impeccable sense of the tempo in attack and defense has helped to make Barcelona the best club side in Europe (arguably) and Spain the best national side in the world (most certainly).

Before I get labeled another Guardianista, back-slapping sycophant for writing this post, I should say I find In Bed with Maradona deeply annoying. Not the site itself, but the site's need to constantly self-promote along the lines of tweeting things like "We got four hundred billion hits today on our piece on underground cockatoo football in Djibouti, we must be doing something right, or at least so says our buddies at a certain AC Jimbo employing newspaper formerly based in Manchester!

EFW meets IBWM
You would own a collection of bruised fingers if you clapped every quality article that appeared on the pages of the delightfully named football blog In Bed With Maradona.
Not many days go by with some form of mutual backslapping and high fiving between European Football Weekends (EFW) and In bed with Maradona (IBWM).

I've written a lot on this blog about the woeful state of most newspaper soccer coverage, particularly in North America, but I've generally treated it as a fact of life like the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. This practice is, ironically, a glaring example of bad football journalism. Mea culpa.

I've written a lot on this blog about the woeful state of most newspaper soccer coverage, particularly in North America, but I've generally treated it as a fact of life like the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. This practice is, ironically, a glaring example of bad football journalism. Mea culpa.