The NYT and The Athletic

‎SI Media With Jimmy Traina: Sports Columnist Bob Kravitz on Ripping The Athletic + Traina Thoughts on Apple Podcasts

 

Just re-upped my annual sub to The Athletic for $24. Had been paying $72. When I hit 'cancel' the discounted offer popped up, along with a NYT games subscription. Read it mainly for the coverage of Boston pro teams, which is still pretty thorough.

 

Dropped my NTY sub and that included the Athletic. The “please come back” offer is $4 a month for 12 months.

That doesn’t seem fiscally smart for them, even with all the options and ads.

 

Get to Thanksgiving and you should get $1/month for a year. Fuck 'em.

 

Why I'm joining The Athletic: The owners eliminated my old job

by Tyler Kepner

 

The NYT Sports pages' long-standing standards and ethics have clearly been trashed after disbanding its sports section. A few days ago - there was a giant 2-page spread about a running team sponsored by On (with no runners from other teams quoted). Then, today, there were TWO half-page track profiles (which is rare enough for the NYT) and both (!) were puff pieces about runners with (you guessed it) the team sponsored by On. Editorially, the NYT seems to be shilling hard for On shoes. Is that their new definition of sports business? PR? Meanwhile, the paper doesn't bother to tell readers who's winning medals at the world championships except for that clown Sha'Carri Richardson (who fairly won the women's 100). Instead, there was a huge 2-3 page spread today about wheelchair football with ZERO time hook. I didn't think it was possible for that section to get any further off the pulse of sports that are happening right now, but it did. There were about a dozen world championships this summer that didn't get an inch of mention - including a huge one in Fukuoka, Japan, for most of July, full of world records. Did the NYT write about any of it? Nope? But this weekend, they just ran full page about street food in Fukuoka in the travel section. I don't get it. At. all.

 

I'm happy for Kepner, considering he's been covering MLB for a quarter century. He's very good.

But I'm not sure dropping $150K-$200K per year for ANOTHER national baseball writer is money well spent for The Athletic.

 

Isn't it already money spent though? Unless he quit, he was either gonna make it on the national desk or writing about baseball for The Athletic. I'm sure there are staffers they're going to make miserable enough to quit, but Tyler is well-known and well-liked enough so that NOT finding him a home at The Athletic was gonna be a headache they didn't want to deal with.

 

There are SIX Ohtani stories on The Athletic site that I just called up. I haven't read them yet, but I bet they all say the same thing.
This comes a day after I decided not to post a complaint about there being FIVE Angels faltering stories, all of them saying the same thing.
Does The Athletic have a baseball editor or anybody to coordinate what is being done??
I always hate it that the columnists think something didn't happen until they write about it. Numerous times, I had one of our columnist tell me what he was writing and I had written it three days ago. "But I'm adding my perspective." Bullshit.

 

https://nypost.com/2023/08/29/why-reporter-dianna-russini-left-espn-for-the-athletic/

 

"Russini is now one of the highest-paid NYT writers in history."

Would love to know how that quote from the Post story is playing throughout the NYT newsroom. Even if it sounds like she will be doing much more than writing.