The Athletic keeps growing .......

Correct, Longtime Listener. The Athletic also doesn't hear from local soccer dads, or SIDs at small schools, or the president of the local golf club who is also a real estate developer and buys ads. So there's no pressure to cover stories that only few people will read.

 

The Athletic announced some regional editors and a few writers today. Still don't understand why they aren't going all in on college football coverage.

 

OK, I’ll bite. They have 18 colleges covered (with one more, I believe Texas, to be announced relatively soon) and seven national writers. How many other sites have that depth of coverage? Just Rivals and 247?

 

This is a great point. Just getting someone to do ratings/surveys is more than half the battle with online stuff, in any business. And that skews things tremendously, and often wrongly, as far as getting true indications. You are forced to either use, directly, and only, a small sample size of opinions, or an average of them (which is terrible because, from the business's point of view, it only takes one very poor rating to wreck things and put you in the hole, so to speak, for a long time, while taking about 10 or 20 good ratings to offset a bad one, or a couple, that you may get).

 

Just write about Big 12 and SEC football. The page views (and exterme fanatics) will follow.

 

I think that if you are competing with the local daily for subscribers you need to cover the local Big Five team. I would think outside of the Northeast the local college football team generally draws more interest than the local hockey team.

 

I'm also confused by this complaint. I subscribed last season for The Athletic's college football coverage and really enjoy it even though they don't have a beat writer for my school. Andy Staples is the only national writer I read that they haven't picked up. There are legitimate criticisms to be made (lack of diversity in hires, the soccer stuff is turning into another European hot take factory), but the college football stuff has been plentiful.

 

The Athletic hasn't raced in to take on the stiffest competition. See how long it took to move into DC because The Post has a strong grip both on subscribers and talent.

A lot of college football beats are the same way. 247 owns that market for subscriptions and Rivals is also still a factor. A lot of the college programs already have at least five fulltime beat writers -- sometimes more -- between Rivals, 247, local college town paper and the metros within the state.

 

They have put on a big push in recent weeks (months?) to be more diverse in hiring. Tashan Reed on FSU was hired right out of school this summer. Colton Pouncy also was hired this summer. Lisa Wilson and Jorge Rojas were just hired for big jobs. Chris Perkins started a week or so ago on the Dolphins. And the Athletic might have been doing a little better job in this respect than it was given credit for, especially in the California bureaus.

 

It helps to target recruitment in markets where the newspapers aren't doing great.

For example, that guy Tally? Why write for the Democrat, making pennies, when you could make more for The Athletic, writing about the same thing.

 

Hmmm, I wonder if the criticism of their all-white hires from the start had anything to do with trying to improve in that area. It's almost as if fair criticism of a growing media organization can be a good thing.

 

I guess it depends on how you define "good." If the Athletic has opened its mind to a pool of talented minority candidates that it wouldn't otherwise have considered, then, yeah, it is a good thing. But if it is making token hires as PR moves just to appease the critics, then I don't know if you can say that is necessarily a good thing. Diversity is an interesting thing given the current dynamics of the business. On the one hand, the public interest aspect of journalism suggests that an organization can't adequately serve the community with a disproportionately white staff. On the other hand, the business side of things demands that an organization produce content that serves the interests of its readers.

I would guess that the Athletic's target readership is disproportionately white. It might not be targeting whites explicitly, but if it is targeting the people it has identified as most likely to spend money on an online sports analysis subscription, and if it’s market research suggests that the people most likely to do so are male college graduates between the ages of 25 and 44, that leads to a dilemma. There are roughly 10.5 million white people that fit that description compared with roughly 2.5 million black people who do so (US Census Bureau, Educational Attainment in the US, 2017).

Those are real numbers. Now, consider the demand-side economics of the labor market. Diversity in hiring is an objective across all industries. The industries that pay the highest are going to attract the most qualified segment of both pools of candidates (white/black). But the black pool dries up a lot quicker than the white pool, because it is 80 percent smaller. Look around the business and you'll see more diversity the higher up the totem poll you go. ESPN has an incredibly diverse staff amongst its highest-paying content producing jobs.