The Athletic keeps growing .......

Even before the era of online comments, our publisher INSISTED on devoting a column of the dead tree edition for anonymous one-paragraph reader comments. Our county seat was a very insulated suburban town full of petty small-town politics and grudges (and a big rift between the old-timers and the newcomers). Needless to say, it turned into a cesspool almost immediately ... so the publisher doubled down by forcing us to create our own version for sports, which turned into an even bigger cesspool (especially given the county seat community's reputation of blowing through basketball coaches every couple of years). We lost quite a few readers over it because they thought it was giving voice to idiots and making their community look awful. Publisher called it "the most important part of the paper" in the middle of the newsroom. I spent the rest of that afternoon updating my resume.

 

Yep -- that was the period when the executives thought "interacting with readers" was going to save us. We would do polls that attracted, say, 25 responses, and would be told, "That's great. We interacted with 25 readers."

 

Yes, some very stupid comments were made by suits. If there were only a few comments on stories, it was the writer's fault for not interacting. You were encouraged to join in with your own comments. I will AGAIN praise the non suits on this. Writers tried for a while to obey the suits' commands. But, sickened by the stupidity and sickened by the insults from readers, the authors of stories simply couldn't bring themselves to comment. Finally like most new ideas ... the suits forgot and just let the readers fight among themselves in the comments section. The suits didn't really know what to do about cuss words in the comments. They tried to assign somebody to police the comments. It all was one big mess.

 

I remember one of my bosses being excited/envious/upset because the competition's story on a subject we also covered had 30 comments. I pointed out that the 30 comments were by a total of 3 people.

 

Well that seems like a fun time.

I will say The Athletic has a progressive affluent bent to it. There’s only so many latitude you’d be given on a site like that to defend, say, the NCAA. National sportswriters tend to be as far left as just about anyone in journalism.

 

So as of May 2019 what's the verdict. Is the Athletic (please answer all questions of Fredrick) ...
a.) a must read?
b.) closing in on irrelevance?
c.) ready to go the way of The National?
d.) thriving and one of the best buys ever?
e.) a major factor in journalism?
f.) no factor in journalism?
g.) primed to last 20 more years paying reporters these huge salaries?
h.) on its last legs?

 

i. Mini-Ditka

 

If I cancel my subscription or stop renewing, it will be because of the Athletic's tedious and predictable political bias and not because of its sports coverage.
Alienating a large segment of your potential customer base -- for gratuitous jollies and self-indulgence, unprofessionally so -- is bad business, and what a dumb shame it will be if that is why the Athletic ultimately fails.

 

Just stick to Breitbart and Infowars, man. You'll be much happier.

 

The Athletic is a grave danger to the republic.

 

Oh for fucks sake another sports site with a political bent? Jesus Christ it’s like a cold sore that won’t go away