The Athletic keeps growing .......

If they can figure out how to deliver me hot ballpark peanuts, I will sign up for a lifetime subscription for sure.

 

With none burnt. That's key.

 

The newsletter is one of my favorite things The Athletic does. Decided to blow up our newsletter and do it in a new model inspired by what The Athletic does with a daily commentary to lead it off.

 

Sounds like at least two new MLB hires will be announced soon.

 

How has that changed engagement, etc.?

 

Anybody have insight into whether they're going to make a similar all-in push with the NBA or NFL this summer like they've done with baseball and hockey and colleges recently? Seems like that would be the next logical move . . .

 

Most of the markets already had NFL and NBA writers....or am I misunderstanding you?

The reason MLB was delayed was because the season (and the need for content) is just starting up. NBA and NFL fans have been getting content for awhile.

 

Having a site that doesn't bombard you with pop-up ads, instant-start audio, etc. is great. If you're going to subscribe to just one Web site for widespread sports coverage, this is the place. Many of their writers are top-notch (though they clearly hired some simply because of proximity or availability). I'm interested to see what counter-moves the newspapers make in the most competitive markets. Any at all, as far as beefed-up coverage or staffing?

 

But they added a bunch of MLB writers in cities where they didn't otherwise have coverage of any kind. Wonder if NBA is getting a similar expansion down the line.

 

Gotcha. I suppose it's possible.

Just counting them up, the current spread is 21 MLB franchises, 19 NHL franchises (7 in Canada), 12 NFL franchises and 10 NBA franchises. That's a bigger gap than I realized, even though MLB is helped by multi-team markets like LA, Chicago and New York already staffed.

I think they start small in markets, using it as a test run. For example, I don't think it'll be long before LA adds NFL and NBA coverage. Other markets like Houston and Arizona, could easily move past just one team being covered. Minnesota started with hockey, but has since added coverage of basketball, football and baseball.

 

We're almost two weeks in and so far our open rate has grown steadily but significantly (I got in trouble for publicly stating specific traffic stats before -- which is dumb, but understand why I'm not giving exacts). We have a decent chunk more than 10K subscribers to the sports newsletter, which until just two weeks ago was just a headline aggregation from our site. Our new newsletter, in a way, is your daily sports section in an email. I tried mixing up my daily commentary today with something that was more insightful and behind-the-scenes and we actually got great email feedback from it today from subscribers. (One troll-ish comment on our website today, though. But oh well.) We also post it every morning at 6 a.m. on our site (the same time it lands in inboxes). For Friday's, I talked to DU's basketball coach for a bit on the phone since the Pioneers are about to start their conference tournament and we don't do much on them (web traffic, ya know?). Basically just wrote a short article about DU being the first D-I team in Colorado to start March Madness, and why this team has a chance to go to the NCAAs. Here is a link to today's that got good feedback:

Idea of rebuilding Colorado State basketball has quality college coaches salivating

The first day, we did get one negative email saying "If you want to do the Denver Sports Omelette, that's fine, but please don't get rid of the old newsletter." So what we did move all of our subscribers from the old list to the new one, but also kept the old that just goes out in the afternoon. And I admit, the first newsletter, I wrote wayyyy toooooooooooo longgggggggggggggggggggg on Lindsey Vonn's final Olympic race.