Athletic, Axios talking merger?

Is the The Athletic staffing the Wolves at all? In Denver their Broncos beat left and they pulled the Nugget writer over to cover the Broncos. I don't think they have replaced him. The NBA coverage appears to be from national writers.

And I kind of follow the Sacramento Kings (for reasons that I cannot rationally explain). Jason Jones has been their beat writer for a couple of years but now he appears to be writing national stories and not regularly on the Kings beat though I am not 100% sure.

Is the Athletic walking away from regularly staffing many NBA teams?

 

I feel like when the Athletic first got going, its goal was to staff just about every pro team and a whole lot of major college football and basketball teams. But then it seems like they (belatedly) came to the following realizations:

1. Staffing up in such a way was going to be difficult in terms of both the money involved and in terms of actually finding people who could meet the quality standard they were trying to set (a quality standard that, as others have pointed out, they have since abandoned in many cases).

2. That a lot of these teams do not generate the reader interest to justify a national publication spending precious resources on a devoted beat writer. I just feel like they went in with a "if we staff it, they will read it" mentality without actually looking to see whether enough people actually care about these teams. One example: The Athletic hired a beat writer to cover Georgetown basketball even though Georgetown basketball barely moves the needle in DC, even when the Hoyas are good (and by the time the Athletic came around, the Hoyas were not at all good). I think that experiment didn't make it through one full season.

So now the Athletic is in a situation where it can no longer set money on fire covering some of these teams so it's trying to half-ass its coverage of them, which doesn't seem particularly wise.

 

That's a good point. Their early hires here were really good and were prominent on their beats.

 

I agree with your analysis. However, I think it is a mistake for two reasons to abandon local coverage.

The first is that I think team loyalties travel more now because even when you move you can still follow your team on television. For example, forty years ago if you moved from Detroit to Denver you were going to see a few national broadcasts on the the big three networks of Detroit teams. The Detroit papers came into Denver a couple days late so it was difficult to read about the teams there. So if you moved to Denver your loyalties tended to transfer because you only had access to Denver teams. Now you can live anywhere and still follow your team. The Athletic provided coverage of out of town teams for fans. I realize that coverage could be obtained by subscribing on-line to the local paper but the Athletic was cheaper and had lots of other material.

The second is what the Athletic did better than anyone else is that the Athletic provided the most comprehensive coverage of sports in one place. So if I was interested in a specific team or person I would go to the Athletic because they would have information and it would not be behind a paywall. There is miniscule interest nationwide in the Sacramento Kings but if a weirdo like me wanted to check on the job status of Luke Walton the Athletic was a good place to go. I think lots of fans have a latent interest in an alma mater or a childhood team and they will pay for editorial product where they can access information.

When the Athletic moves away from that they start to look like ESPN and do not have a distinctive product. I do think that The Athletic made mistakes early on. I think they overvalued the brand value of many of the writers they hired for beats and I think they have not really developed a really outstanding product. For example, last night the big sports event was the Thursday Night Football Game. It will be one of the 10 most watched programs this week. The Athletic has the staff and talent to produce really outstanding coverage of the game and they don't. I am talking locker room stories from both locker rooms, etc. Given that they probably had a couple staffers there already they could have a game story out along with locker room room stories, etc. but they do not do that.

 

Are you sure about that?

When I was on The Athletic this morning, the website actually had a tab at the top, "Steelers vs. Vikings," and now I am seeing the following articles on The Athletic ...

A Vikings column by Chad Graff
A Vikings "what does this mean" analysis by Graff
A Steelers column/notebook/what we learned massive piece by Mark Kaboly
A Steelers column by Ed Bouchette
A straight gamer by The Athletic staff

That's not comprehensive enough for a Thursday night football game between two teams struggling in playoff hunt? This isn't the Super Bowl.

 

What have they had on UCLA basketball? It's a pretty good team. It has a pretty good tradition. It's in a pretty big city.

 

I would hope (and I assume) they are not basing their coverage decisions solely on traffic. Engagement is a much better metric, and logic says that's a lot more likely if readers have a connection with the writer. Logic also says those are the writers who have 50,000 Twitter followers. Those engaged folks are the ones who are going to stick around when subscriptions jump to $60/year.

Yeah, like a supermarket you need to stock everything, but maybe finding alternative, cheaper coverage (obv not AP) is a better long-term play for some beats — Georgetown hoops was a good example. Perhaps you team with the student daily to license some of their stories. Probably not saving a ton over a stringer (not that I want to see folks' income sources dry up), but it's something. Again, I'm sure they're smart enough to figure that out.

 

Are the Steelers or the Vikings one of your preferred teams that you follow Because when I tried just now there was nothing on my front page. I then hit the NFL tab and one story appeared. I freely admit to being a klutz so maybe it is me.

 

I found that coverage by navigating to the team-specific pages for the Steelers and Vikings.

 

If it's true that FanDuel and DraftKings, who are tossing around cash without any concern, passed, that doesn't look good.

 

They’re reeeeeeallly trying to put public pressure on The NY Times to make this happen aren’t they?