The Athletic keeps growing .......

Sponsored posts and advertisements. It's also a Chinese company, so, naturally, it's harvesting as much user data as possible and likely selling that off.

 

Yep. Love how jackass companies like Barstool Sports will write a bajillion stories about who the cool kids are on Tik Tok despite this knowledge about the Chinese and data but soon as this turns into Far East Cambridge Analytica they’ll be like “OMG this is fucked up we didn’t see this coming!”

 

Fuck Barstool Sports. And fuck David Porknoy.

 

I’m guessing there are two types of newspapers scoop tweets: those sent as soon as the reporter has confirmed the story and those with a link to the story. The first one often cannibalizes the second.

 

Tap is right. How long does it take to post a story with 3-4 paragraphs so you can have a link in the tweet that breaks the news? Even if it's 15-20 minutes, usually it's seen as too long to take on the risk of another reporter having it first. You do that only with something you get that nobody else would be chasing.

 

A lot of times it’s the mindset of writers, and this is an example shared by a friend.

A few years ago Player X agreed to a contract extension (this came out of nowhere). Writer Y breaks it on Twitter. Writer takes 20 minutes to file a proper story. Sports desk then works on editing story for 20 minutes.

What should have been done:
— Reporter calls desk to give news
— Desk posts a 1-liner, gives reporter a link
— Reporter tweets out said 1-liner

That could be accomplished in 45 seconds. Every second does matter, but you can usually spare 45 seconds before you post it on Twitter.

I don’t see how this is so difficult.

 

It's not 45 seconds. It's not close to 45 seconds. Even if you can call someone and get that person and they can drop everything, write carefully, post immediately, even if you don't need a photo to post a story where you work, it's not 45 seconds. If you had said five minutes, I might give you that, and only in this exact circumstance. Should we try to write quickly, post quickly and then tweet? Yes, definitely, we should.

 

[QUOTE="mediaguy, post: 4670765, member: 1422"[Should we try to write quickly, post quickly and then tweet? Yes, definitely, we should.[/QUOTE]
Nah. You got to tweet it first. The suits demand it for no reason except to say you got the 'scoop.' It's really ridiculous. Then once you tweet it, you need to write it fast but you need to have total concentation because nobody's going to edit it worth a damn. This business is a total joke. Twitter does not help pageviews. Twitter is just for news organizations to break mostly worthless news. Some suit decided Twitter would break all news and that's that.

 

Nope. Because there are so few bodies in newspaper organizations if you do what you suggest there's a great chance of error. What reporter would possibly feel confident that in "giving news" to desk that they'd get the headline right and type in the one-liner correctly? Only an idiot would trust others to get it right in this day and age. The reporter MUST tweet first. It's the (journalism) law.

 

Where do some of y'all work at?!? At my first three stops -- all newspapers -- I had direct access to the CMS and could self-publish. Shouldn't take more than two minutes to create a slug.

 

Reporter phones desk.
Desk jockey: “Sports, can I help you?”
Reporter: “It’s Joey Jones. You won’t believe it, Podunk is going to re-sign Scooter McScooterface to a 21-year, eleventy billion dollar contract. Give me the slot.”
Slot answers.
Reporter: “It’s Jones. I got this, it’s breaking. McScooterface is getting a 21-year, eleventy billion dollar contract. Can you post?”
Slot guy: “Sure, give us a sec.”
Slot guy creates file, types in one sentence — “Scooter McScooterface will become Podunk’s highest-paid athlete, after sources said he agreed to a 21-year, eleventy billion dollar contract.” He types in headline: “McScooterface agrees to insane deal with Podunk Tigers.” He carefully reads it twice. Runs a quick spell check. He hits post. He e-mails reporter with link. Slot Slacks link to whomever else may need it (social media, push alert folk, site homepage, etc.). After link goes out, someone else on the desk can jump in and insert a photo, use whatever B copy is sent by reporter, etc.

Ok, maybe two minutes. I used to do this for a living, so perhaps I’m being too flip about it.

 

Which creates its own set of problems, especially if the reporter has no editing experience and files raw copy that looks like jibberish.