The Athletic ... any thoughts ...

Charles Foster Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.

Price of red ink has gone up.
But an increasing number of people seem to enjoy reading a biased "news" product.

 

Found this on a Forbes article.
"What is most compelling is that The Athletic needs a bit less than 2,000 subscribers per team per market in order to break even, according to Founder and CEO Alex Mather. He also said that The Athletic, which was launched in January 2016, has reached thousands-of-subscriptions already in both Chicago and Toronto despite only being eleven months old in Chicago and one month old in Toronto."

It's a leap for Thompson and Kawakami - but the best thing about BANG is its in the Bay Area and I'm sure there is plenty of uncertainty around. Better to take control of your own career than count on someone else looking out for you.

 

Don't know if it warrants its own thread, so I will put it here. Greg Bedard is launching Boston Sports Journal, a subscription site at $40/year.

Boston Sports Journal | Coming Soon!

Chris Price and he will cover the Pats, Sean McAdam will cover the Red Sox, and an unnamed writer will cover the Bruins. He says they will travel with the teams.

He writes that Dejan Kovacevic was his model. Don't think the comparison is very good. Boston is still a two paper town, the ProJo and MassLive have good coverage, and WEEI and the two local sports networks have some online coverage. (Not all of the online writers travel, though.)

[Edit] Forget ESPN Boston, although Mike Reiss is the only person to read there.

 

Holy Toledo, and with Purdy retiring, BANG has no sports columnists.

 

Kawakami discusses his decision to leave BANG for The Athletic --Interview: Tim Kawakami on leaving The Mercury News and joining The Athletic – Bay Area Sports Guy

 

I'm sure I'm not accounting for other factors, but I paid $39.95 for my subscription. Finding 1,999 more like me would generate $80,000. Will that truly be enough to pay the writer and pay the costs of sending that writer on the road with his/her team?

 

Hmmm. Excellent read. You should give it a read. What I got out of it ... people still want to read good stuff. People in fact according to him have a "hunger" for it. People will pay the 6-10 bucks a month. They will. No ads. Selling subscriptions is the goal. Very very interesting, suits. Had you not listened to the consultants years ago would we be in this position today? Tim seemed into podcasts in his answers, not so much the video craze. Won't do lame videos "at the expense of reporting/writing." So, the naysayers say nobody wants to read and for sure NOBODY will pay for a subscription to anything anymore. Tim says they do want to read and no pop up ads. Subscriptions guarantee $$ and the model is working? It's too late for newspapers, but those brave enough to go out and do websites like this have a fighting chance. Yeah, you may not travel as much but as he said newspapers may be cutting down on travel anyway. The way newspapers are going, we're two years from no print product at all and an almost all video platform. The independent websites and The Athletic believe people can make a living charging folks 10 bucks a month. We shall see who wins.

 

I like the Athletic. I subscribe to the Cleveland site. But this isn't some way forward for the industry. It's a life boat for a few talented writers in each market. Everybody else on the boat is going or already has gone into the icy water.

 

They just raised another $5.8 million, and, according to this, Toronto is turning a profit. Encouraging news, I think.

 

Oh, yes and no. Do we need The Athletic in most places?

On the one hand, I think it's good that "angel invested" sites like this one or SEC Country (funded by Cox) are out there paying journalists to do good work - paying them better, say, than local newspapers that are owned by penny pinching, absentee media companies? Sure.

On the other hand...there are a lot of local markets that don't need more journalists. I read that The Athletic will be starting college basketball and college football sites. That's good for Seth Davis and Stewart Mandel, who seem like nice enough people. But is it needed? Doesn't it just water down the market even more? What, another Alabama beat writer? A 12th story on Tom Herman's first game at Texas?

If The Athletic truly innovates I'll be interested. As much as I don't care for certain aspects of The Player's Tribune...it is innovative. It's PR BS, but it's innovative.


If it's 2006 journalism, only on a new platform, meh. And this feels like 2006. If you told me Bill Connelly and Ken Pomeroy were starting a site that blended narrative journalism with their analytical work, that's interesting to me. A bunch of nice guys who do the same work they've always been doing, only for a different company, does not so much