The Athletic keeps growing .......

In fairness, the Bee just hired a 49ers writer to replace one who left. Although I agree that the aggregators are a waste of a position.

 

Are skinny jeans on men better or worse than cargo shorts?

Goddamm, life is hard sometimes.

 

Worse. At least cargo shorts are functional.

 

I the Post is best daily newspaper in the country to work for. Better than the NYT. Both the Post and the NYT are profitable but the Times is still a public company with a lot of debt and a legacy print operation. Bezos can more easily afford a couple bad quarters. As for the LA Times the new ownership is still in their honeymoon phase.

 

You’re not out of touch, per se. A lot of journalists are just self-promoting whores now because that’s what social media does to them.

 

One thing i’ll say about newspapers: Almost every single day, I get an email message from a young kid who is desperate to get into the business, who would do anything for a job. I get that it sucks if someone “raids” your staff, but there are people out there eager to work in sports journalism and if you’re a sports editor, you ought to have your eye (always) on potential replacements. And if you can’t hire someone because you have a hiring freeze, so all anyone can ever do at a paper is leave, that’s a reflection of how fucking stupid newspaper execs are. At the very least you ought to be able to hire for positions that leave. It would be like the equivalent of a college basketball team saying “oh shit we lost two guys to the NBA, I guess we’ll just play with three from now on.” instead of replacing them with young, inexperienced but talented freshmen.

 

Newspapers, like the NCAA, would benefit greatly from free labor under the guise of scholarship. (Most of those schollys are worth more than the salaries of the sports writers who left and cant be replaced).

 

Just read excellent piece in the Athletic by Ari Wasserman about OSU’s bungling of the Meyer press conference. By failing to allow access to the report, they ensured Meyer will be bombarded with questions at his next availability. Even handed. Insightful.
Fanbois in the comments said they’re dropping subscriptions. Basically said they did not subscribe to the Athletic in order to read about scandal. They subscribed to read about their team.
This brings up an issue. The Athletic markets itself specifically to fans of particular teams or regions. For some, this is the extent of subscription.
So if they’re going to cover the bad along with the good, as they should, do they face this backlash phenomenon often?
Newspapers— such as they were — could keep people in theory because subscribers might read more than the sports section.

 

Newspapers struggle in this day and age for 17 different reasons, but one is just a refusal to change because some copy desk/designer/editor has an equal or greater voice to the person out there with 16,000 twitter followers driving traffic everyday. Their value to the public and the profitability of the operation is not equal. When “hey, where’s 3 players to watch box! where is it! How are people gonna know who to watch for! Where is it! It runs in 3 days!” Is still a real email writers get, it’s a problem.

One message The Athletic has given its writers - I know this second-hand, I don’t work there - is “you don’t have to do any of that stuff if you don’t want. Focus on what you do well and what no one else is doing.”

That message, as much as the salaries, was surely seductive to writers.

 

The Athletic is about driving subscriptions. A well-done feature might generate a few subscriptions. A "3 players to watch" box won't.

 

I would wager that 100 percent of newspaper beat writers in the last 20 years have been told, upon taking the job, that their bosses wanted big-picture impact and not the daily humdrum of groin pulls and Player Of The Week honors. And then the first time someone pulls a groin, the bosses call in a panic because there's no headline on that.

The Athletic is living up to its word and letting these guys do the work they want to do.

 

I agree. I think this happens. And it's an ego thing left over from some golden era of the business where the purpose was to win a pissing match with the crosstown paper or the AP or whatever because people bought your paper for the ads. (Or, worse, a beat writer would feel beholden to "be there" for the team she or he covers.)