The Athletic keeps growing .......

They don't match anything on the 401K

 

They're offering/paying well over $100,000 in smaller markets to NFL beat writers.

 

I'm not sure the average print newspaper reader -- my mom and others her age, perhaps? -- gives a damn about The Athletic, because it's not delivered to their door every morning, with stories about their neighborhood and grandkids. But that's also not The Athletic's target market.

I think The Athletic and newspaper sports sections have exactly the same mission: to provide information to readers. Which information and how it's presented are different, but everyone's trying to gather it up and get it out there.

We'll all find out which format readers prefer, particularly as more and more old-school newspapers put their sports sites behind hard paywalls.

 

And other sites too (DK, Sports Capitol, Boston Sports Journal, BSN Denver, new football site in Buffalo, etc etc). 40k subscribers for DK. I’ve heard the others are doing pretty well too.

 

30% off at DK's site if you offer your wife up for a threesome.

 

I'll eat my shoe if Boston Sports Journal is still in operation a year from today.

 

Bear with Fredrick here. See, this is where newspapers failed when the big mouth consultants came in, said to receptive publishers (purchasing newsprint is expensive and a major hassle) to cut, cut, cut the print product, go for the flashy internet site and make sure IT IS FREE! You know, the genuises that demanded newspaper internet sites be free are long gone. They are out of the newspaper business, on to the next big thang in which they can spread their expertise (lol) and consulting ability around.
Anyhow, you just said it. There is still an age group (boomers) that no matter what we do to our newspapers in terms of cutting, cutting, cutting and raising prices, prices, prices, members of that age group will never abandon print. So because of these boomers, we've ruined the product for any other age group (nobody besides a Boomer would buy a print newspaper of 2019; it's TRASH), yet we still have to print for them.
Unfortunately we can't dump the print product (which is an albatross considering staff size, thanks hedge funds) cause of the boomers who will subscribe until they die. So we keep on cutting staff (thanks to ad staffs that can only sell hearing aid ads and old folks home ads) and now we're charging for our online stuff. Guess what? It's too late. The only people who NEED our product are the boomers who need the paper in their hands at breakfast. Sure our Internet stories and videos (lol) are good enough, but advertisers are not interested and we'll see how many subscribers for our internet sites we can attract (not many).

Fredrick's position? Since we are not going to improve the print product enough to make it something every reader must have, not just the Boomers, cut the print product entirely to the Boomers' chagrin. Sell as many online subscriptions and ads as you can and cut staffs accordingly. Once enough cuts are made to sustain the Internet operation, put out an Internet newspaper for years to come.
For Our mission is not to put names of grandkids in the paper anymore. Our mission is to write clickbait headlines and stories and try to make money somehow connected to amount of pageviews (LOL it ain't working) and sell a few subscriptions years after the analysts told us NOBODY WILL PAY FOR NEWS ON THE FREE INTERNET! Tell me Fredrick isn't smarter than most, try to tell me that!

I promise I will never repeat myself again. I will copy and paste this when I see the need every six months or so to explain what really happened to newspapers.

 

Salt and pepper?

 

The editors are largely correct when they point out that newspapers cover the day-to-day news better. What I fear they are missing is that coverage of that news is not nearly as valuable now as it was back when people got all of their information from a single source. What those editors really need to think about is how often their "more comprehensive" day-to-day coverage includes information that readers cannot somewhere else for free. The Internet is such that die-hard sports fans get their news in close-to-real time, whether via Twitter or Facebook or aggregators. They do not need newspaper websites to provide that information. That's the fundamental difference between the newspaper and Athletic model: newspapers still have their writers spending 80 percent of their time on the Who What Where and When. The Athletic tells its writers, "let those other guys do that, because our data says that's not what people are willing to pay for." Maybe the editors have better data than the folks at the Athletic.

 

As someone who subscribes to both the Denver Post and the Athletic I agree the missions of the products appear to be different. But getting anyone to pay for editorial content now is difficult. Perhaps a city like Denver will support one sports section, but certainly not two. I think that someone will survive but they will wind up trying to cover both the day to day items and provide meaningful analysis and features.

 

Cayenne pepper

 

This is not an absolute statement. As I stated earlier in this thread, I know a small-market NFL guy who left for the The Athletic for around $65,000.