Athletic, Axios talking merger?

Second Philly writer to jump back to print. Meghan Montemurro left for the Chicago Tribune.

 

This was a legacy of Grantland- manufacture 3,500 words of slop, stories that people already know about their fave movies and wait for the web strikes to pile up.

 

Whoa did you know the first scene of "The Karate Kid Part II" was supposed to be the final scene in "The Karate Kid?"

 

I have heard that Molly is no longer with The Athletic.

 

Very interesting. Her bio no longer mentions The Athletic and this is among today's Tweets:

 

I hope she winds up someplace that fits her talents, a place where she can write what has already been written 2 days ago and call it a column.

 

byh-

The one podcast I ever listened to was the one where Simmons and Squee and all his buddies talk about Boogie Nights. The guys didn't even know the Easter eggs in the movie.

Like the roundtables we used to do for football tabs - "Yeah! This will take up four pages if we get them to say the right things."

I guess an oral history is great for views but it doesn't require much in the way of work or journalism (originality either).

 

What a mistake. My goodness.

 

She has a feature today on a gay Dodgers exec responsible for a lot of good things happening for the franchise. The tagline says she is a senior staff writer. Maybe she wrote it in advance, don't know.

 

I got an offer re: the Athletic the other day: $1 a month for 12 months. I pulled the trigger.

I read enough locally for my tastes, so I went straight away to their motorsports coverage. I've never regularly read Jeff Gluck's work, but have followed his career casually and know he has a good reputation.

And I looked at the section. I get the idea is to put out very good, meaty pieces, but I felt like that was lacking. Maybe it's just the nature of motorsports and limited numbers of races a week in all top series? There was a piece on racing at Bowman Gray that seemed pretty boilerplate (short track that's more than your typical short track). It did have a good lede. Little mention of Indycar, a brief mention of F1 in its weekly TV listings. That surprised me, because I thought The Athletic UK would be covering that like a glove? No mention of top-level sprint car or sports car racing, such as it is. No mention of SRX, which kicks off tomorrow with a bunch of star drivers and is airing on over-the-air TV nationwide. I checked again today and there's still nothing there.

It was good stuff, but not a lot of stuff. I'll check it out semi-regularly. I don't know if I'd pay full price. I wish them well.

 

This is The Athletic's unofficial tagline. And it's why within the last year, they quietly shifted their model to increase volume. I believe there's a quota of stories required from their writers now (I'd say don't quote me on that but we're on a message board). And get this -- apparently, some of the staffers are apparently upset that they're being asked to write more. Go figure.