The NYT and The Athletic

The people who think beat writers should be writing nine stories a week shouldn't be in charge of newsroom ops of any kind. Every progressive outlet has found lowering volume in exchange for more quality stories leads to more traffic and more subscribers.

 

But what about SI dot com [/extreme sarcasm font]?

 

The nine is hyperbole. My bad. (Tho there are columnists who write 7-9 pieces a week)

Not trying to be difficult...but according to whom? The Athletic? The Athletic doesn't make money. It loses money like I do at a craps table. It burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to be a loss-leader that broke local media markets. The Athletic failed - utterly - at that task.

I'm all for quality stories, no doubt. But the idea that subscribers would rather have two stories than, say, six relies on the two stories being way, way better than the six ever could be. And I'm not sure that's possible week after week.

 

The Times/Athletic partnership is going to create some very awkward synergistic choices for the suits, if it hasn't already. When will they decide having two Times staffers and a stringer along with three Athletic staffers at a playoff game is four or five too many? Which entity gets preferential treatment? The mother ship or the new toy? And what if management decides it's just better to use The Athletic in print instead of the long-tenured Times writers?

 

The local media outlets are not going out of business - at least not for sports reasons. It is not "happening."

 

The last two places I've worked, including the one I'm currently at, are two of the biggest shops in the country and they have operated that way.

 

Why The Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers (Published 2017)

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic, said in an interview in San Francisco. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

Now, later in that article Mather says the following:

Subscribers might read just one section, but their subscription gets them the entire paper. Mather and Hansmann believe that sports is an undervalued part of that bundle, and that there are tens of thousands of sports fans in each city who don’t care about the other sections, and would rather jettison their subscription and pay for The Athletic instead.

“I think the sports page has carried local papers for a while, and they don’t treat it well,” Mather said.

But that doesn't mean the newspapers were necessarily dying out. The sports sections of those newspapers were keeping them alive, to some degree.

 

Fair enough.

There are metrics, of course, for these things. The biggest, biggest papers in America, NYT and The Post, make a lot of sub money off of one Donald Trump.

The sports operations that rely most heavily on subs - the recruiting sites - have perpetual content. 60 a month, is my understanding at one of the sites.

 

Again, it'd be so much easier to get a chuckle out of how the Times gave the venture capital bros their parachute if it didn't net said venture capital bros millions and millions while leaving in an ever-familiar and permanent state of uncertainty all those who'd staked their careers on The Athletic being different.

 

Agreed. Although I’m not worried about a number of the top names getting job somewhere else. They always do. It’s the team beat writers - especially in smaller markets.