Scotland's mainstream football writers have never hidden their contempt for the blogging community. They consider the men and women who create content for fan websites as uncouth amateurs who ought to be kept at a considerable distance from the professionals as they chisel out their golden prose.

This was comically apparent in the general reaction of the newspaper chaps (and they are still mainly chaps) following Celtic’s press conference last month to unveil Ange Postecoglu as their new head coach. The club, you see, had organised two press conferences: one for the mainstream media and one for the Celtic fan bloggers.

This, you felt, was an enlightened and progressive move by the club. Celtic’s blogging community has grown in recent years to be a vibrant and highly sophisticated purveyor of news and comment about all things Parkhead. There are literally hundreds of high-quality Celtic fan websites, blogs and podcasts providing a daily, round-the-clock news, features and comment service for the club’s massive global fan-base.

They’re a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly … much like the mainstream media who seem so threatened by their presence. In the main though, I’ve found them to be fluent and well-informed. Indeed, the paranoia of which Celtic supporters are often accused was pulsing through the chaps with the cheap suits who sit in the press box following Celtic’s move to include the bloggers and podcasters. Their reaction was something between a curled lip of disdain and a smirk signifying contempt.

READ MORE: Celtic chief executive Dom McKay advised by ex-SPL boss Roger Mitchell in open letter

This was a retrograde and tribal gesture by Celtic, seemed to be the general consensus of the Matalan army. No good could possibly come of this. Why are these knuckle-draggers even being given house-room by Scotland’s grandest club?

I’ll leave aside for the moment the very obvious fact that many of the bloggers who gathered to engage with Ange Postecoglu are sharper and more eloquent observers of Scottish football – and Celtic in particular – than many of the mainstream scribes.

Celtic’s move formally to acknowledge the bloggers and podcasters as a distinctive bloc deserving of parity of esteem with the mainstream is an inevitable consequence of profound change in the old newspaper models of delivery.

Not the least of these is that there are now far fewer mainstream journalists covering senior football in Scotland. Cuts to editorial budgets have seen sports desks in the same newspaper group merged and dozens of posts disappear as publications have struggled to keep pace with the digital revolution. The talent gene pool has thus been reduced to a puddle and several of the finest writers have left the trade entirely. This has created a massive gap for the more enterprising fan sites to fill.

Celtic’s global reach is evident in the numbers of overseas supporters clubs that continue to flower each year. Absence from the homeland seems to increase a thirst for news about the Hoops. That and the fact that a love for Celtic is often deepened and renewed in each new generation rather than diluted. I don’t know if a similar process of progression is evident with other football clubs but’s certainly so with Celtic.

The fan websites and podcasts which have grown to meet this demand are offering them something of which the mainstream outlets are increasingly less capable. Moreover, many of the more gifted and tech savvy in this community enhance their offerings with sophisticated imagery and animation of a quality that many in the mainstream, beset by dwindling personnel, have struggled to match. Crucially, the content is often provided with wit and self-deprecating humour; qualities that are rarely evident in the mainstream sector which, in Scotland anyway, tends to treat these as evidence of jaikiedom … or, worse still, a university education.

FACING LARSSON: Facing Henrik Larsson: Celtic's magnificent seven as seen by the defenders he tormented

During a decade running the sports sections of Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman I was genuinely quite disturbed to witness how much football journalism was resistant to change. This was brought home to me when, after appointing Moira Gordon as Scotland’s first ever female football reporter, our sports desk had no option but to boycott that year’s annual Scottish Football Writers Association player-of-the-year dinner. They didn’t like women being present at these bashes, you see. Indeed in the words of one of their panjandrums, “there shall be nae burdz”.

That we had also appointed Ginny Clark as the UK’s first-ever female sports editor (of Scotland on Sunday) rendered us psychologically unstable in the eyes of some of our esteemed colleagues on rival papers. When we started covering women’s football and women’s rugby some of them began to implement physical distancing measures.

Happily the other titles began to catch up and women are a little more visible in the realm of Scottish football journalism. Regrettably, not much else has changed. The football pages on our major titles are still dominated by articles that contain little more than the dull propaganda of favoured managers and players. Coaches still “pledge” and “vow”; players still “insist” and “claim”. Very little signifying originality or freshness seems to have happened in the football departments of our main newspapers in the last two decades. Coverage of European and world football is almost non-existent.

Soon, the bloggers will be considered the mainstream with the old print journalists pushed to the margins. Rather than dismiss them as untutored interlopers the mainstream sector should start learning from them. Their own survival might come to depend on how willing they are to do this.