I love my job as a football journalist covering Wolves - but there's a dark side to my work online
'How can you call yourself a journalist?' 'Idiot, why aren't you asking the tough questions?' 'What do you know, you're just a Middlesbrough fan!' 'You're a disgrace, how can you back Gary O'Neil?' 'You're a joke Judah, you need to be sacked, just f*** o**!'
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These are some of the less offensive messages that have been sent over the past week on X (formally Twitter) or shouted by certain fans toward me while conducting post-match interviews.
They also make up probably less than 0.01 per cent of the interactions I've had with my 48,000 followers and yet these are the comments that you remember the longest.
I've been in this industry for nearly 20 years – this January will represent a decade at the Express & Star and Shropshire Star. You work in journalism, you learn to have a thick skin.
But does that make it acceptable? Should that make it the norm? Should this toxicity be the environment we want young, aspiring multimedia journalists dealing with on a daily basis? I hope not.
The negativity from the outside often coexists with Wolves not performing on the pitch and the latest set of results have brought a new wave of online and in-person abuse from certain quarters.
Audience engagement is a massive part of my job and for that to be a success, social media has been essential for gathering information, expressing opinions and interacting with the (mostly incredible) Wolves fanbase.
I've never had Facebook, never had Instagram, never had Myspace, still don't fully-understand TikTok & when I finally put the pen and microphone down, I'll most-likely delete X (Twitter).
I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the platform – you can't take your eyes off it for better or for worse.
But as a journalist, for breaking news, it's still the first place many will visit, and thus the rocky marriage between myself and X will continue for the foreseeable future.
The fans are hurting, they're hurting badly and you can understand their anger following a wretched start to the season.
As we come out the second international break of the campaign, Wolves are rooted to the bottom of the table, 20th.
