Pissing match: Post-Dispatch vs. The Athletic

In this age of unlimited content, I am finding that limiting my content is making me much saner.

I only read NPR for national news. Everything I need to know is there. I read BBC for world news. I have a couple of local outlets and that's it.

I wanted The Athletic to be that for me, but it is not. For my morning box scores and hard sports news (scores, big events) I find myself going to the Yahoo Sports app. It's clean and sharp and gives me a good box score and more and more highlights if I want to watch them. I don't want to bounce from app to app. Since The Athletic has crappy boxes, I visit it less and less. Yahoo is my goto in the morning.

I'm looking at The Athletic more and more like SI used to be, once a week. I'm unsure if once a week survives. It might.

 

The Ducks announcers talked about it a little bit, including the ramifications of a defenseman having to decide whether to go for a big hit that might result in a penalty, or engaging in a fight. That would put the team at risk of getting a penalty and leaving them with 4 defenseman for a period of time. Hayward talked about that some during the game.

The point is, there was no reporting about how it happened or who messed up.

Sorry, Elliotte, like Dotchin on the Ducks, Hockey Night in Canada hasn't made the DirecTV lineup yet in SoCal.

 

And people in Milwaukee pay for that?

 

I suspect the Athletic's success varies wildly from market to market, and that it is almost entirely dependent on the followings of individual reporters. At $5/month, a reporter only needs to have an audience of 2,000 subscribers to support a $110,000 compensation package and $10,000 travel budget.

 

Terry apparently suffered a broken leg blocking a shot by Giordano the night before.

 

While I agree that one of the many annoying things about the Athletic is that every story is presented as if it's the Most Important Story in the World...the utility infielder's great uncle had cancer when he was playing at Stanford and he's a 9,000 word story about him overcoming adversity.

BUT I do want to step in to defend the Athletic writers. If your editor is on your ass telling you that every story must strive to be *different* , something that readers can't get anywhere else.... well, that takes time, and you can't be churning out copy like a "normal beat writer" because you're not being paid to be a "normal beat writer." You can disagree with the Athletic's strategy but just don't take shots at the writers for being lazy, because in my experience they're anything but.

 

None of this falls on the writers at all. And I've liked lots of things that have come from Athletic writers.

I'm just saying this idea of "insight" only works if the Athletic writer - now that he or she belongs to a national organization - can somehow convince the team they've always been covering (which, in many cases, is indeed the case) that they should get more access and special interview time because of their change in companies.

Otherwise, it's just a beat writer writing every 3 or 4 days.

But it's not a bad little gamble. The nuts and bolts daily stuff is often given away for free by giant Internet conglomerate sites - ESPNs, SBNations, etc. If you're going to build a subscription service, gotta write stuff people can't get elsewhere for free.

 

Turned the game on just as your crew was discussing it. I'm honestly amazed this doesn't happen more often.

 

Given they are already letting people go in some instances, is that not an indicator they are not meeting their financial goals/quotas? And a $10,000 travel budget won't take you very far.

 

No one is questioning the work ethic of the writers. But to Alma’s point, I can’t say that what I’m paying for is truly “insider” content. I’m finding that it’s merely good writing that comes from a reporter without a deadline. Still, I want that insider content that I purportedly can’t get elsewhere.

I watched Russell Westbrook’s historic 20-20-21 game last night and was curious to see if The Athletic would write anything about it and how Russ dedicated the game to Nipsey. I was happy to see that the Thunder writer did. It was a good piece. Solid read. But it had nothing I couldn’t and didn’t get elsewhere.

What I was hoping for was to be taken behind the scenes. To be taken to a scene before the game, when Russ was putting this performance together in his head, when he put the clothes together that he wore to the game that paid homage to Nipsey. These little insider details that others didn’t have, that The Athletic advertises. That’s what I wanted. I realize they don’t write gamers often, so maybe this is a bad example, but the whole idea of having reporters not work on a deadline is to allow them time to get these details that newspaper scribes don’t have the time to get, isn’t it?

 

Russ isn’t giving that kind of access to anyone.