Pissing match: Post-Dispatch vs. The Athletic

There are other local Athletic sites where the volume is surprisingly light. Also, I know they are not trying to provide "game coverage," but when a team plays at 1 p.m. on opening day, I think it's pretty poor to make the reader wait until the next morning to see a story. That was the case last week in some Athletic cities.

 

I've found Derrick Gould to be pretty solid on Cardinals coverage; other back-up writers or baseball feature writers can be very soft.

 

It is on the platform for hiring the writer and not making him write more.

Just checked... Still not another article. Guess he doesn't realize Yelich has hit four home runs in four games and a walk-off base hit.

 

Still no stories on the Brewers. That might have nothing to do with the writer; perhaps he needed the weekend off for personal reasons. Whatever the case, The Athletic is bragging about having 300 journalists. Great -- do what any good sports editor does with a staff of six or eight: shift another writer into the slot for a few days.

 

I'm not sure the Milwaukee site has many writers; I think they laid off a couple part-timers.

Their Brewers beat writer, Robert Murray, has been tweeting, but hasn't written since March 28.

 

I'm in a group text with a ton of buddies who have The Athletic. One of them lamented the local site doesn't produce enough content, and I agree. My buddy who works for them and I were covering the local NBA team on the road and something incredibly unique happened and he didn't write about it that night.

 

I subscribed for the hockey coverage. Not that the Ducks should have daily coverage anymore, but team management made a serious screwup before the Edmonton game on Saturday and not a word about it. OCR didn't make the trip, either, and AP didn't mention it.

Defenseman Jake Dotchin was not in the submitted lineup, which, somehow, listed only 19 players. When he jumped over the boards for his first shift in the first minute, play was stopped. After a discussion, Dotchin was ruled ineligible for this game and sent to the locker room. The Ducks had to play with 5 defenseman the rest of the game.
John Ahlers, the TV play-by-play man, said he noticed it on his roster during the national anthems. I think this happened in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago and the refs caught the mistake before the game started.

Still nothing in any of the news sources. Maybe it's because the Oilers pulled one of their no-shows and the Ducks won anyway.

 

I don't see much wrong with this, but I personally wouldn't have named any other site in the tweet.
I work in central Ohio and there's a grassroots basketball site whose founder constantly promotes himself with this kind of thing. Very much a chest-beater. That said, he never directly bashes any site seen as a potential competitor, including my outlet even though we don't do exactly the same thing (mine is a traditional weekly, he does a ton of recruiting news and their coverage borders on fan-boyish quite a bit of the time).

 

To me, the initial fallacy is that readers should have to choose between a daily paper, which offers an online presence, and an online-only platform with a different focus. The passive-aggressive nature of the exchange spoke for itself, IMO.

Not sure how the level of Milwaukee coverage is directly relevant, but one would have to assume that if The Athletic management set a higher expectation level regarding the frequency of content, they would either demand it or get a different beat writer/columnists. If local subscribers joined only for Brewers content, seems the answer is to non-renew.

The thing I've wondered about The Athletic from the start is whether their business model is sustainable. They have no advertising, apparently depending on subscription revenue, a model that has been tried many times, mostly with a lack of success. They hired a lot of big names, but what will happen when their venture capital runs out? I've heard they already let go many of their non-contract employees.

 

To me this mildly falls along the lines of making reporters ask readers to get subscriptions, which is a pretty popular thing these days. Maybe he was directed by a higher up because the Athletic has dinged numbers even more. Maybe he did it to fulfill that subscription ask but just put some numbers and a competitor behind it. Maybe he's just insecure. Who knows.

Regardless it's definitely not an apples to apples comparison. As others have said, I don't read the Athletic for gamers or photos or anything else. Just want good, insightful stories by good writers, which so far it's lived up to that. I will agree with others that I am somewhat surprised by the lack of frequent content that sometimes happens. Baseball, for example, you'd think there would be almost daily stories for teams the opening week of the season. Not two or three.

 

If there's a thing that bugs me about The Athletic, it's this "insightful" thing. You don't write but once every 3-4 days, it'd better more than an insightful one-off. It'd better pretty fucking good.

A newspaper daily baseball beat writer is giving me more consistent cumulative insight than somebody who swoops in every 3-4 days with "insight."

What The Athletic's really trying to do - and in some cases, I suppose, done - is act like its local beat writers belong some national organization that gets them better access to sources for overarching thinkpieces. It's a clever idea. Not sure it'll work on a super-large scale.