The NYT and The Athletic

Man, David Simon apparently has more pull than me. Still waiting for them to correct the line about Buddy Teevens being first college football coach to eliminate tackling in practice.

 

Who is claiming Bird is based on this guy, the guy or the writer?

 

Seemingly the writer since the subject freely says he’s never seen The Wire?

 

That’s almost as bad as the SB Nation longform piece praising the rapist. Almost.

 

Not unless the guy pulled a fast one on Keefer and the entire backstory is bullshit. Which is impossible. Right?

 

I know it is not my money but thee are 32 NFL teams, 30 MLB teams, 3o NBA teams and 52 NHL teams and nine CFL teams. There are also 67 teams on the Power Four conferences. Let's assume that the Athletic staffed each of those beats with two reporters and attempted to cover it in the fashion as local papers. If the Athletic did that it would require 396 local reporters plus some national reporters (I know this is an oversimplification but bear with me).

How many local papers staff their local sports teams that well anymore? If the Athletic devoted those resources to coverage their would be very few sports sections that could provide superior coverage, especially since the Athletic would have national coverage the local papers lack.

Sports Illustrated, in it's heyday, had four million subscribers. I would think that if the Athletic was producing the best sports section in each market in North America it could generate four million subscribers at $70 bucks a year.

But the strategy of current management is to reduce all local beats except for one NFL beat reporter. I don't think a strategy of steadily reducing quality is the road to generating enough revenue to make an adequate return on investment. I can cite many examples where this has been tried and I am unaware of any that have been successful.

 

Work smarter, not harder.

 

Work harder, not smarter. I'm pretty sure that's the ethos these days.

 

We had a round of layoffs at my shop around 15 years ago. So the staff asks, “what are we going to stop covering?” Nothing, says the boss. “So we still have to cover X?” Of course. “We still have to give three reads for each story?” Why yes! “Can we adjust how much we cover Y?” The hell with you, you’re doing it the way you always did it. And by God, bossman was correct.

 

I think that mindset has washed out to some degree. Analytics are good enough these days hat "Jesus, stop covering that now" is a typical refrain.

 

The last two papers I was at, stories didn't even get read by the slot editor anymore. One read and ship it.

No paper proofs anymore, either. Just proof the pages on the screen. And that's never as good as printed proofs to read.

When the layoffs got to me, I was fine with that. All that pressure and stress washed away in a flash.

 

Joe Posnanski's newsletter is an almost unbearable mess of treacle on most days, but this was super interesting from today, when he wrote about how his plan to turn The Football 100 into a book morphed into a project in which he wrote from scratch a book about the 100 best moments in football history in just a year.

I think I’ve briefly talked about how this happened: John and Dutton Publishing actually bought The Football 101 that ran here on JoeBlogs, my countdown of the 101 greatest football players ever. They planned to publish it in September. That was going to be a super-easy turn; the book was already written, so all I needed to do was some rewriting. I would have had it finished months ago with no stress at all.

Then, probably late summer, I made the admittedly crazy decision to instead start entirely from scratch and write a completely different book. I did this for a very personal reason that I will share with you.

First, though, I will not deny that my thinking did begin not long after The Athletic announced that they were releasing a book called The Football 100. I have not spoken about that book or The Athletic and I’m not going to now. I’m grateful for my time there and I’ll just leave it at that.

So yeah. Apparently.