Athletic, Axios talking merger?

You can say whatever you want about me. I would never claim to know how open-heart surgery works because I saw it in Doogie Howser.

Your racism is cute though.

 

I pay a dollar a month for The Athletic. Hope they get more from others.

As far as discretionary income, The Athletic would have to be at the bottom of the list. I'll pay the dollar a month, I've paid nearly $3/month, but it's just sports articles. Something I can easily live without If I'm choosing between streaming services, legit news like the NYT or Washington Post, music that I can listen to anytime or anywhere, the sports site is falling way behind those if I have to cut costs.

 

This would be a big refocusing of sports for NYT. That’s interesting to me. They certainly haven’t ever tried to have coverage of every game or every team, never tried to be ESPN.com or SI.com with wall to wall coverage of the sports news of the day. They’ll never cover where the No. 1 recruit decides to go, but maybe how the modern recruiting system works.


In my eyes, they consistently have some of the most insightful, interesting and well-reported sports stories in the business.

The Athletic does great work, but really different work. That’d be a very interesting shift, in my eyes.

 

For what NYT is, a subscription model for years now, their focus is spot on. No point trying to be wall to wall in a business where all the sites who are chasing views, and journalists trying to build their Twitter follower counts, are doing the same thing. Even if you can do it better, it's exhausting and the average reader is less likely to notice the difference in quality than those in the business. The payoff isn't worth it. Find stories on topics that nobody else is doing because people will be more interested in subscribing to learn something they can't somewhere else versus just reading a better version or take of what else is out there. To me, the Athletic, though subscription based, is a cross between the two different models because of all the team beat reporters.

 

I'd love to know what way the Times and Post think the wind is blowing in the content business. We're about to enter a period of massive consolidation. You're starting to see it on the video side (MGM/Amazon), and it's going to happen on the print side. The "cord-cutting," a la carte era was a needed step, but people aren't going to stomach $100+ in subscription fees for their daily reading. Wonder if the NYT sees a future where print consolidates the way TV always does. Ten years from now, all content is owned by the Times, Post, Wall Street Journal and maybe one of the websites.

 

Felter's role of playing Athletic stan/board villain is pretty entertaining, to be honest.

I might have missed it, but one of the things in that Axios post that might have been overlooked: They made a ton of cuts to editorial staff in 2020 and allegedly hired double that number back. However, none of those hires seem to have been writers. That is not ideal.

 

Tech bros turn into the villains they were supposed to rescue us all from, chapter the infinite.

 

This is a doubly interesting point given the Times doesn't even staff all the local teams anymore. Would be something even by 2021 standards if they jumped from that to providing an online home for every team in the land.

 

Literally who?

 

If I was Tim “Apple” Cook I would kick the tires of The Athletic. Apple is looking to add sports to its entertainment offerings and buying the Athletic and using its name and talent as the core of a sports channel for Apple TV could make some sense.

 

Why purchase the Athletic for that purpose, though? If they're interested in getting into broadcast space, there are enough free agents like Kenny Mayne and Trey Wingo floating out there that they could just bid for them. I doubt Apple has much interest in an online content business, since AFAIK they haven't tried to do an Apple News or anything like that, which would seem like a first step.

Also, as Ragu has pointed out, given the VC money that's been dumped into the Athletic, if it's for sale right now it's probably not at an especially affordable price - the VC people want to get out, with a return on their investment, or a slight loss. The only combination of "deep pockets" and "need the talent" that makes sense to me as a buyer would be ESPN, ironically, which would be like when Dundler Mifflin acquired the Michael Scott Paper Company. I think ESPN would rather see the Athletic fail though, and then just re-sign columnists they lost.