The Athletic keeps growing .......

That APSE Twitter feed is dynamite. It's mostly a stream of retweeted JPEGs of broadsheet/tabloid Sports fronts, interrupted by string of announcements that a bunch of talented writers are leaving newspapers to join the Athletic. Can't think of a better illustration of my point. We've got guys like Alma who still think the joke is on people who think newspapers could have preemptively eliminated a lot of the competition they now face by diversifying their portfolio of content to include younger, fresher, less traditional voices who ended up taking advantage of the democratizing power of the Internet to produce that content anyway. It's partly hilarious, partly sad.

I've never been a Simmons fan, but the guy has helped reinvent mediums and create revenue streams that newspapers easily could have capitalized on -- the podcast network and the 30 for 30 series, in particular -- while hiring a slew of writers who have built huge audiences and who now wouldn't even think about returning a hiring newspaper editor's call (Zach Lowe, Andy Greenwald, Bill Barnwell, Shea Serrano). His writing was not my cup of tea. But there was a market for it, much more so than a lot of the content newspapers were producing and continue to produce to this day. Was Simmons any more of an affront to journalism than the tired graf-quote-graf-quote mail-in jobs from No. 2 and No. 3 columnists across the country? Yet guys like Alma were never threatened by that content, so they never lashed out at it.

Turns out, they were right to be threatened by it, just like newspapers are right to be threatened by the Athletic. Here, once again, the impulse is to mount the high horse and yell about all the things that the Athletic is doing wrong instead of rising to the challenge and considering how a newspaper might better serve the market that the Athletic is now attracting. The thing that guys like Alma don't understand is that newspaper sports sections will soon reach a point where nobody even bothers to respond, because the newspaper sports section no longer matters to anybody except those in the APSE circle jerk complimenting each other on how neat the design of their Sports fronts look.

 

Greg Auman to the Athletic from the Tampa Bay Times to cover the Bucs, per Twitter.

 

Charlie Brasi to cover the Hurricanes for the North Carolina site

 

If they’re going to have a “North Carolina vertical,” will it have a NASCAR beat writer?

And as a more general question, when will the venture capital run out?

 

Armada of NFL beat writers leaving newspapers for The Athletic. They'd better hope the new venture survives. I wonder if they'll have trouble getting back into newspapers if they have to come crawling back. The timing on this is interesting, to say the least. Right before the season starts.

 

Exactly. When will it run out? It seems like they have unlimited money right now but surely that can't last forever.

 

I’m curious how many readers are being retained at the full price after their discounted rate runs out.

 

Don't have to be in Nashville in order to subscribe. I'm guessing they'll branch out and involve Memphis, which adds Tigers and Grizzlies to the list. Plus Vandy is possible as well.

 

There are people who want to read about Vandy? Who knew?

 

I said it's possible....

 

Some personal news to share: I’m not going anywhere