Alright, might as well talk about the big elephant in the room when it comes to major sports media news this week.
The NYT has bought The Athletic.
To say I am a little skeptical on the future of The Athletic is putting it mildly. Not that I necessarily have a problem with the NYT itself, but I just don't see their culture meshing very well with The Athletic, and especially not with how much The Athletic has hired beat reporters for most major franchises and college teams.
Have to wonder if this means we're going to see a massive round of layoffs in the near future with all reporting being consolidated to a main editor, and a de-emphasis on beat reporting. And if that doesn't happen, you also have to wonder if this is going to exponentially increase subscription rates.
Speaking about rates.... well, I'll let Joe speak to this one...
What's interesting is one of The Athletics' biggest perks for subscribers is it is ad free. https://t.co/7p25Cw5fu7— THE KEY PLAY (@thekeyplay) January 6, 2022
So yeah, to read that they were already talking about bringing ads into their services when in regards to The Athletic....
Sigh, why do I get the bad feeling that this is the end of a good thing.
Comments
Paging Mr. Bitter
This is going to suck big time. Anyone who thinks this is going to be for the better is smoking cat terds for pot!
What about licking dog turds?
Having issues embedding the tweet via mobile, but Chris Vannini (national CFB reporter for The Athletic) had a short thread about this.
Essentially, staff has been told the plan is to continue like normal and they'll be doing the same thing. "The Athletic will be a subsidiary of The Times Company and continue to operate separately."
Now, we'll see how that lasts in the longer term, but it seems like things won't change all that much from the user end.
I'm sure this will be the case for a year or two, but I believe the staff of The Wirecutter was essentially told the same thing but slowly that independence has been chipped away and now you need a NYT subscription for it (beyond a limited number of free views per month). The Athletic is somewhat different since it is a pay site already, but I suspect it will eventually be folded in and require a NYT subscription as well
Its the message you have to convey when you take over a company. If all of the employees at the company that's being taken over jump right when the news is announced it'll be a disaster.
I remember when I was working at Cabela's when Bass Pro bought Cabela's. Johnny Morris came in sold everyone on the importance of Cabela's impact west of the Mississippi and all of us in Sidney were fine and Bass Pro would keep a number of corporate operations and the DC open there....a few months later offers to buy people out of their job started, a month or two after that they fired the people that didn't take the deal, the systematically closed and listed all of the Nebraska operations over the next year or two. Corporate take overs are brutal and pretty much only a few people actually know the plan.
Fact.
Full 3 tweet from Vannini
Bonus Bitter response to someone talking about the first Vannini Tweet
They can say that all they want, but the second they start putting upper and middle management from the NYT into roles within The Athletic, it'll effectively be the sports department of the NYT.
Its like when IBM acquired Red Hat and promised all their employees that they wouldn't IBMify the company... Yeah, they didn't do it overnight, just allowed the culture to assimilate RedHat over a few years.
Red Hat employee here. That is immediately where my head went too
I started at my company a few months after a corporation bought us. The first few years it was clearly the company I signed up for. Fun, younger crowd, driven by multiple motivations.
Now it's your standard cold corporate death hole. There are obviously worse companies that I could work for, but there's a big reason why the character of the company I came on to is gone and now it's just a stereotypical 9-5 gig.
For every IBM/Red Hat situation, there's also an Amazon/Audible or a Microsoft/LinkedIn where the acquired company was able to keep their own.
I don't think you can say "for every", I think the scenario where they stay independent for a long time is way rarer than slowly being consumed by corporate overlords. For the NYT specifically, The Wirecutter is an example where this has already played out so it would be surprising if The Athletic is different
That's fair.
I was so terrified when Audible was acquired by Amazon. I've been using them since you used to burn CDs from the stuff you bought. It is one of the few purchased companies I can think of where their product/service improved after purchase and they weren't just cut up for scraps and sold off.
If you enjoy podcasts - listen to the How I Built This on Audible. It's a good listen.
The real question is, does my NYT subscription mean I can read The Athletic now?
Hahahahahaha
Super ironic situation.
When the Athletic started out, the founder said that "We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing" in an NYT interview.
Leg for your TKPC tag
Lol thanks
The Athletic always run deals for good prices for their subscription, so most of us probably pay about $35/yr or so.
i saw on twitter, NYT bought them for $550 million, or $460 per subscriber. thought that was interesting. and i hope nothing changes with the Athletic, but I am skeptical.
Way to soon to say if this is good, bad, or neither yet IMO, but it is interesting.
One of the few good things about the media industry today is that it's really easy and affordable for creators to build their own platforms. Just look at how the members of Banner Society created SZD, Channel6, or ExtraPoints. If the writers I like at The Athletic (Staples, Feldman, Mandell, Vanninni, Weisermann, etc) lost editorial control of their work, I'm pretty confident they could do their own work elsewhere, just like Godfrey/Richard/Kirsh, Spencer/Holly, Matt Brown, etc did
This has been my stance on it so far. Too soon to garner any kind of significant reaction, but could see it going several different ways. Your three options seem to cover all the bases pretty well.
The Athletic's current model was never sustainable at their current prices and the current media environment. They have been bleeding money since they started and continue to do so. And they still provide massive discounts to new subscribers at an effort to create as large as a base as possible.
Looking back, it seems like this was always the plan for the founders of The Athletic. I think their goal was always to hire the best sports journalists to hurt everyone else and create as large of a subscriber base as possible and then sell and get out of this business. They pretty much said this when they stated they wanted to bleed everyone else dry. Amazon did this same thing in a way when they were operating at a loss for a while undercutting everyone, but the difference is Amazon has many more income streams and is involved in many more sectors they can capitalize on. The Athletic only has articles and subscriber data that they can sell.