The Athletic layoffs

I think @MeanGreenATO had a list of the first page of this thread that had to be pretty close to complete.

 

I second this.

 

Mariotti is wrong in his assessment that fire-slinging columnists was the golden ticket.

He's right that the site lacks strong personalities, and the ones it has are lost, to some degree, in a deluge of content from everywhere and everyone.

I'd add, too, a lot of the stories are just too long. I doubt that affects much on the subscription side. But they're too long. There's a nicely-reported piece on what former Utah players think of Morgan Scalley, but it reads like an endless legal brief that has to be over 3,000 words.

 

My apologies. The last time I saw the list there was about 15 names. He has 30+ now. Thanks.

 

True. If you had more columnists and fewer reporters, the columnists would be tackling each other every time another NFL story came up. Anarchy of ego.

 

There's one baseball beat writer whose endless stories at The Athletic have me convinced his previous editors deserved combat pay.

 

Say a Prayer For The Pretender ... Jay Mariotti

 

The list includes three MMA reporters and one MMA editor. That suggests to me that people were not reading that content. Wish those folks could have been moved to other responsibilities.

 

Sorry, as interesting as MMA is, that's two reporters and an editor too many for that beat ...

 

When I write an 800-word story I feel like that’s real long.

 

No offense to Moddy/others who work there, but I'm constantly dumbfounded at the length of Athletic stories. Most should be less than 20 inches or read like it is.

 

Agree about the story lengths. They vomit their notebooks into a story and unless it's really damned good, at some point you just give up.

Years ago an editor friend of mine said working on websites was great "because you can write as long as you want to." I told him just because you can doesn't mean you should.