The Athletic keeps growing .......

Sounds a lot like my media consumption.

 

Uber went public. It's not funded by VCs anymore. VCs may be shareholder but they aren't pumping new capital into the company anymore.

 

As the company has already disclosed, the staff are full-time (W2) and receive health benefits, 401k, monthly stipend to offset incidental costs, and paid paternity leave.

And then I see folks here talking about "server costs" and "IT departments" as the real financial impediments to The Athletic's success.

I mean, holy shit, y'all.

The vast majority of the commentary on this website concerns the decline of the industry, layoffs, "getting out of the business", etc. So here comes along a venture that creates hundreds, going on thousands, of good jobs, and it begins to reverse some of the trends. And the company is absolutely thriving. But here we are talking about server costs.

As Allen Iverson once said, "SERVER COSTS?!!!"

 

Do you work for The Athletic?

 

He said on an earlier post he is one of the founders. Sounds authentic to me (no pun intended on his screen name). I would say that the Athletic surely has contract workers (without benefits) complementing the scads of full-timers. I thought that some of the writers even said that publicly (i.e., that they are contributors as opposed to staff). And there's nothing wrong with some contractors.

 

Thanks for coming here again and making this post.
It just cracks me up that there are people on here who know something about newspapers/journalism, know a little less about benefits, and know even less about technology. But they continue to post these lengthy "guesses" about revenue vs. expenses. 500,000 paid subscribers is a lot; 500,000 ain't that much. With each paying around $60 a year, that equals (fill in blank).
You don't know how many subscribers they have. You don't know how much was paid to subscribe. You don't know the travel budget. You don't know the level of benefits. You don't know the tech costs. So why post on the viability of the company? It's crazy talk.

 

There's a reason for the guessing. Maybe I'm sticking my head in the lion's mouth here, but....

For one, there's no public masthead or directory, a traditional feature of most journalism publications, except on each individual city page. Even that is not consistent, as several city pages don't have staff lists (Baltimore and Jacksonville, as two examples). Without that public directory, it's hard to truly gauge the size of the editorial staff.

Second, many in this industry come from a time when circulation numbers were publicly available. As a private company, you're under no obligation to reveal the precise number of subscriptions or their breakdown, but the absence of that information leads to more speculation and estimation.

Third, the general public is still used to companies that exist with brick and mortar buildings. Outside of your respective HQs in the States, Canada, and presumably London, you have no physical presence. There's no need, since everything can be done remotely. So for people who have spent their entire lives in physical newsrooms, it's harder to get a grasp on how the whole operation works.

Finally, every single one of us has had the other shoe drop on our heads at some point. So when you guys say on here and in other publications that people should just get on board, that the company is thriving and reversing trends in the industry, we're all skeptical. It's not that we don't want a viable online distribution model for quality journalism. We do. We desperately do. It's that we've all been burned more than enough in the past.

If the Athletic really is performing so well, perhaps it'd be a recruiting boon to explain some of how you're doing it, what costs you've been able to mitigate, and what areas you've decided to finance more heavily than traditional news outlets. If you truly want to be an ambassador for the Athletic and a new wave of digital journalism, perhaps it might be beneficial to be less combative and more willing to explain.

 

Pretty much explains why this thread exists. Spot on.

Believe me when I say at least 90 percent of the people on this thread, including myself, want The Athletic to succeed.

 

My bad. That's what you get for not reading the beginning of the thread.

 

Why not? As a subscriber I don't see why I can't be interested in the viability of the product.

As for the 500,000 subscriber number it was reported Bloomberg a couple weeks ago. The revenue number of $64 a subscriber was also reported there (the link is further up the thread).

 

I got a $59.99 charge to my credit card. I went to their support link and sent an email telling them that they were not authorized to charge anything to my card without asking me first. I said that $59.99 was too much for this, I would pay $30, which is what I paid last year. I said the next move was up to them, either refund me $29.99 and I stay, or $59.99 and I'm done.
I got a response pretty quick. It said they were turning it over to a rep and they would respond in 3-5 days. But $30 was the introductory rate, the regular rate was $59.99, blah, blah, blah. We'll see .........

 

Damn keep us posted please. That's rotten to the core.