The NYT and The Athletic

If a perusal of their team sites is accurate, The Athletic is already down a bunch of beats: Rays, Astros (?!), Athletics, Marlins, Nationals, Diamondbacks and maybe the Rockies. That's almost a quarter of the league. Not great and probably not gonna get better under management that stopped treating baseball like a beat at the newspaper of record in the biggest baseball market of all.

 

I am a subscriber and Rockies fan, and it appears like they’ve been using their Rockies writer to chase clicks with the NBA and Stanley Cup playoffs going. That’s fine. The Rockies stink and daily coverage may just depress me enough to cancel my subscription. I will be interested to see if they get back into the Rockies later this month/summer.

 

Five of those seven teams rank 19th or lower in average home attendance, per ESPN. Houston and Colorado are outliers among that group since both are top 10 in attendance.

It's a lot like recruiting coverage -- your readership has to be large enough to warrant a sizable salary. If that doesn't happen, your job is then at risk.

 

Sure, I see the logic. But it's hypocritical and diminishes the scope promised by tech bros, now busy counting their money on a deserted island. (I also understand hypocrisy and diminished scopes are features, not bugs, for tech bros and media companies)

 

And with a team like the Rays, you aren't beating Marc Topkin on anything breaking or newsworthy, so it's a pointless exercise to try. There's probably some decent long-form stuff within an organization like that, but that's something their national baseball writers can tackle.

 

I'm finding that they aren't writing enough. Their work is good, but maybe lacking in volume.

If Lisa Dillman has, indeed, been laid off, it could be because she simply didn't write enough ... sometimes only once a week on the Kings. She wasted time with very minor transactions, i.e. one-graf notes on a seventh defenseman or a fourth-line winger being called up, or somebody signing a contract with Ontario (AHL) that will pay them $700,000 a year if they get called up or $75,000 a year if they don't.

Eric Stephens, the Ducks writer, produces much more than Dillman did, but Kings' stories always get more comments than Ducks' stories. If it's because they aren't traveling, then that is a fundamental flaw in The Athletic's game plan.

 

Baseball is going to be interesting. The Washington Baseball Team might gets its beat writer back once the fan base accepts there is a rebuild under way. When that epiphany arrives, there will be -- paradoxically -- a greater interest in reading because the farm system will presumably get better and that improvement will generate page views.

 

I agree with this. I'm all for not being a content farm (it will be soon enough, I imagine), but if you're writing once or twice a week in season when your site was founded on providing authoritative coverage of all things all teams, people are going to tune out.

 

I think you all are being quick to blame the writer for not producing enough copy. I think it's more that the editors for whatever reason are choosing not to publish enough. You can't tell me, for example, that Lisa Dillman is only filing one story a week. I'll bet she was cranking out a lot of copy but all we got some weeks were the throwaway stories on minor-leaguers.
I am also fairly confident in saying generating subscriptions matters more than all metrics for those at the top of The Athletic. If you're wondering why someone got dusted, look there.

 

Well wasn’t one of the Athletics mission statements getting rid of the gamer and the kind of “stations of the cross” sports journalism that led to a ton of shallow, empty copy?

Stand to reason there’d be fewer stories up and the ones that go up are deeper and meatier….. Sounds like now its finding a balance between too little and filler

 

You really think writers for The Athletic write stories that don't get posted? How would that make sense? How could there be a space issue like with a newspaper?