The Athletic keeps growing .......

How would it be overworking employees? Their job is to cover the WNBA. Not cover the WNBA and the NBA and MLB.

 

There are some markets where WNBA coverage is absolutely warranted. Take Minnesota, for example. That was the first market to get its own writer for last season. I'm guessing the numbers were good enough that the powers that be determined there is enough of a new market to tap into. The WNBA niche isn't the same as the men's sports niche, but there's a pretty loyal following in most markets, even if it's in smaller quantities. And I'd guess much of the WNBA subscriber base includes households that wouldn't normally subscribe to The Athletic, so it increases the site's profile and reach.

 

How many niche subscribers would you need to justify the salary and expenses?

 

I pay $60 bucks a year for my subscription. In a major market 50K(?) salary for a beat writer. And another 20K in benefits. The WNBA has a 34 game schedule so I would spitball travel at 30K. If you are looking at roughly 100k in costs maybe 2,000 incremental subscribers at $60 each.

 

There is absolutely no following for the Connecticut WNBA team.

 

I think that the only people who care about the WNBA are super hard core sports fans who already subscribe to the Athletic for other sports.

 

Which means this move likely won't bring in much new business.

 

No benefits for contractors right? That’s the cost effective point of contract vs employee

 

Really? I thought UConn country would embrace the WNBA.

 

We are getting into the minutia of labor law but I think it would be hard to categorize a true beat writer as a contractor. If an employee is a contractor, to oversimplify, you are paying for a product, like a story. If someone is an employee you control an employee's actions and time worked. So if you want to someone to just do a standard list of stories such as previews, game stories,e tc. you put them on contract. But it is a hard to compensate a contractor for calling his sources to check the status of a coaching search or going to practice to nose around for a possible story.

I also assummed the employee would get health insurance which is not a requirement.

 

Just say it. Lesbians.

 

Agree its a dubious practice but its also rather commonplace. I doubt many of them are starting at 50k also. The first round picks in that league make 53k after all.

Looks like of the 12 beat writers, 2 have over 10k twitter followers and several are under 1000. So this is not poaching 100k salary veterans for the nfl, more likely people trying to break in for peanuts. Which isnt a bad thing, its exactly like newspapers, but still the cost to the Athletic is probably not near $1.2 million/100k per team.