The Athletic layoffs

Mike Huguenin still one of the best I ever worked with.

 

Looks like most if not all of the Phoenix and Miami staffs were let go.

 

I second on Huguenin. At least one Miami person is still around. Manny Navarro. Andre Fernandez, George Richards and Chris Perkins are all class acts.

 

Well, to be fair, no one saw a pandemic coming. Well, except maybe Wimbledon, since it had insurance. I don't think this is proof positive they didn't know what they were doing. Let's see what happens coming out of coronavirus.

 

No, but the wild expansion without a sustainable business plan? NOBODY went to The Athletic for video (which was shuttered before this). Who needs more podcasts? They bragged about wanting to make you fall in love with the sports page again, and then went all audio and video. This is just like the 1999-2000 boom in which everything was fine as long as the economy kept going up in a straight line. And why do these cuts now, when most sports are planning to return?

 

Maybe this is like college athletics. Maybe the Trumpandemic is an excuse and an opportunity for them to do what they had been considering for a while anyway. That's the only thing I can think of given your point on timing.

 

Could be the fiscal year or something. That'd be my hunch.

Big pay cuts for those remaining, too.

That Web site can't really pivot to the pandemic or race politics except through the lens of sports, and there's a lot of evidence that people don't want their sports seen through a political lens. Twitter does. But not the regular subscriber.

 

This is especially true given their business model, which is essentially based on homerism.

 

Good point. Yes, they want local subscribers to local content.

The local stuff is underwhelming, not unusually different - if at all different - from newspapers.

The national stuff is national stuff. Sharp liberal/progressive slant to the features/opinions, newsy nuggets, transaction wires, etc. They could a couple contrarian voices but sites like that never do it, because they've made such a concerted effort to hire groupthink in the first place. NYT is running into it now.

 

You’d think maybe they’d be better positioned than papers to sustain through the pandemic given they don’t rely on ad revenue at all, and it takes someone going out of their way to cancel a subscription to hurt the bottom line.