The Athletic layoffs

There's lots of threads around here about job losses. I guess we're all celebrating those too.

The Athletic tech bros aren't the first to be treated as if they were reinventing the wheel and "building something that could be viable in the future." The turn of the century had sports and news sites popping up, all promising to reinvent how news was consumed. (They did, they ensured no one would ever want to pay for content ever again) Athletes Direct promised to cut out the pesky middle man. The bigwigs all made touted investments in trying to deliver beat-like coverage at a national level. ESPN had its local sites, CBS had the Rapid Reports, Fox built websites for the FSNs. All went kaput. Their margin of error was whatever patience management had for an unprofitable enterprise or the whims of the economy. The turn-of-the-century boom went bust as the economy cratered in '00-01.

The Athletic had more "independent" money behind it (independent only in that they didn't have to worry about bean counters slashing the operation for shits and giggles) and launched in the midst of the longest bull market in decades, one that remained in bonus time for three years with orange asshole until he ignored a pandemic that brought everything crashing down. Now that the economy has tanked, The Athletic is like all its predecessors in every way. They have no real answer on how to make money with a subscription-based site. And their response to the pandemic shutdown--slashing staff--proves they're really no different than the corporate wonks running the earlier sites.

That's where the antipathy comes from in this thread. I would bet almost everyone here knows someone working at The Athletic. We want the site to succeed for them. But we know what the end game is.

 

The Secret Behind Jealousy: Overcoming Unhealthy Competition In Order To Achieve Real Success

 

Cool link bro. Hope sucking up here gets you a job there.

 

Do you wear knee pads while you blow the Athletic executives, or do you just rough it and deal with the rug burn?

 

Dude walked into the wrong hornet’s nest. Sportswriters are the most jealous motherfuckers on the planet. All salt no sugar.

 

Maybe post better. Or post less. One of the two would be nice.

 

A non-writer friend with a day job wrote a fantasy hockey column for Fox, for free, in the early 2000s. I urged him to ask for modest payment. When he did, they dropped the column on the spot.

 

Forbes dude? Fucking FORBES?!? Oh god. So that’s the game you wanna play now.

Ahem:
Jeffrey Epstein Pitched a New Narrative. These Sites Published It. (Published 2019)

 

You know, for a platform that is pretty revolutionary and is built to destroy newspapers, kind of weird that they just lost a Phillies beat writer to the Chicago Tribune.

 

She went home. That matters.

 

Totally get that, as there could also be external factors that precipitated the move. But I just wanted to point it out for folks who think The Athletic is some soul-crushing monster that is going to obliterate print. That's probably never going to happen -- which is OK and shouldn't hurt The Athletic one bit.