The Athletic keeps growing .......

That's prevelant at other news orgs, and it's one of the most annoying things to see. Often, I see four or five people sharing the story on Twitter:

"Excellent piece by @whoever. A must read."
"YOU MUST READ THIS"
"Stop what you're doing and read this story by @whoever. Hire him/her. Now."

I read the story and, more often than not, it's shit.

 

Twitter often is a big circle jerk for the 2 percent of the population who uses it.

 

Perhaps you have had a different experience or know people with a different experience, but that is the exact opposite of my understanding.
It's not traffic count so much as subscription conversion count, but those two things are usually linked.

...And I admittedly don't know everyone who works at the Athletic, but of the people I do know, zero are working on a fixed term contract.

 

This is not accurate. Maybe some of the really big names have three-year or more contracts, but most are on one- or in some cases two-year deals based on what I've heard. Some were able to negotiate being at-will.

 

I said they have deals that extend as far as four years. Of course that includes many 1 and 2 year contracts. But there some with three and four-year deals.

 

This does seem to happen a lot. I agree it's lame and the stories are nothing special. Yet ... The Athletic is revolutionizing the industry. It's making it and newspapers are not.

 

I have a question to the suits on here. Or the regular folk. Do any newspapers actually make determinations on letting a reporter go or stay by virtue of his or her pageviews? Are you serious? I mean ... page views have NOTHING to do with how good a story is. Comment on this if you would.

 

I am sure that if you are a national reporter like yourself audience metrics are a major part of your evaluations. But are beat writers on local papers being routinely removed because of poor metrics?

 

I don't know if people are being removed for lack of clicks, but a pretty good local paper I know definitely tells reporters, "Hey, your clicks are low," or perhaps more insidiously, "So-and-so has a lot more clicks than you lately; that shouldn't be the case," or some such.

 

Vanity traffic never made sense to me, especially because ad revenue is small piece of the pie.

Get people coming back often enough where they want to plunk down whatever you charge a month.

The way you do that is by creating compelling stories, whether they’re text- or visual-centric.

It’s not that difficult.