Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Thursday, January 06, 2022
The New York Times will buy The Athletic for $550 million after months of talks, according to a new report from the Information.
Representatives for the storied newspaper and the subscription sports news website did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report, which pointed out that acquiring the smaller site will help the Times move toward its goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025. It currently has about 8.3 million and The Athletic has over 1.2 million.
The Athletic has been looking for a buyer for months. Initial talks with not only the Times, but Axios, fell through in 2020 and in September, the company hired LionTree investment bank as it looked for funding and explored a sale at a value that was estimated could reach $750 million.
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1. Rough CarriganMost of those 1.2 million subscribers already are NYT subscribers, according to my top-secret data.
For the Times, I guess the plan is to scale back the compensation. Less competition for their own employees. Don’t have any actual numbers to back this up, but seems the Athletic was paying very well to get the high profile writers they wanted. That gravy train is over, so expect the more popular ones to leave now.
Which sets up a new opportunity for some venture capitalists to hire the top writers, build a new site, and cash in from the next deep pocketed source.
You paid $72 million over the last two years? Can I hang out with you? ;-) I kid, I kid! I'd hang out with you anyway, super smart baseball guy, Angels fan. Dog and a beer on me?
Yea, they're burning money.
But I imagine the NYT is not banking on them making a profit, just adding a name for its porfolio, maybe offering some sort of bundle.
In terms of content, I've found them to be sadly around replacement level. Not to say their writers aren't damn good writers. No, rather, what I'm saying is the actual information I get from them isn't much above what I can get from any other source. In the brief window I've had the subscription I got the sense, based on topics and content produced, that someone on their Red Sox beat reads the posts on Sox Therapy here before writing about stuff. I'm not going to pay The Athletic to tell me stuff that I wrote.
Given how easy it is to get discounts, both when you sign up and when you try to cancel, my guess would be that 1.2 million subscribers would only work out to 40-50 million revenue.
:)
I've said something similar in the past. I subscribe to The Athletic and I'm reasonably content with what I get for my money. The content there is pretty standard-issue sportswriter stuff -- they're not breaking any new ground or really innovating. But they just have so many of the writers I like and the biggest sportswriter names that I felt like I kind of had to subscribe, just to keep up.
FWIW having checked out the Athletic and especially the comments threads I really doubt many NYT subscribers in Athletic pool. Just my sense.
Time to sell off the Hall of Merit?
If I wasn't already using my brother's NYT login, I'd probably subscribe to get their Athletic coverage.
If there are multiple dozens my apologies for understating
I was talking about data. We have piles and piles of data. None of it will help sell donuts.
When I get interested in soccer or pro football there’s plenty to read about. I equate The Athletic with a digital version of the old Sporting News from my youth. I loved that magazine and I like the Athletic as well.
Losing Posnanski was a shame.
I highly recommend trying it out for a year.
Rosenthal must be in seventh heaven being with the NYT. If you thought he was insufferably woke before just wait.
If they sell for $550 million I'll probably cancel my subscription because (a) I already pay for the NY Times and (b) I subscribed to support good journalism, not to help some VCs make hundreds of millions of dollars.
Thank you for linking to this article, it was a really enjoyable read.
ok, I chuckled
Schedules
Results
Stats
Transactions
Injury updates
Anecdotes
Plans and strategies
Personnel quotes
Amazing and or interesting events
All of that is easily obtainable and free
You're sure going to be disappointed someday when you check out the NYT comment threads.
Their college football coverage is outstanding, and they've got some great NBA writers like Hollinger and Sam Amick. Baseball is not quite as good, but still has some excellent in-depth reporting and fun writers like Jayson Stark and Eno Sarris. I do miss Posnanski, but can't bring myself to pay $60/year for his Substack.
The Athletic also runs weekly columns by Richard Deitsch about sports media coverage, an issue that I don't particularly care about but the columns are interesting anyway.
On baseball their most unique voice in terms of content is Jayson Stark, and he's the Cliff Clavin of the bunch. Like, yes, nobody else is going to do the digging to tell me what Joc Pederson's HR in July has to do with Frank Tanana, so in that sense I can't get that information anywhere else. But, like, people at Cheers would listen to Cliff, but nobody went to Cheers to find out what Cliff was saying, y'know?
Coke to you, Walt!
Have to admit my first thought was hoping Chass would blog about this just to get one more of his old-man-ranting-at-clouds piece…
Personally, I'd gladly pay for a combination of pro basketball, NFL, and MLB deep-dive analytics content with personalities who are actually strong communicators in addition to highly-skilled analysts. For example, Zach Lowe does NBA content that is extremely enjoyable to watch/listen to, and deeply analytic. If there was a product that combined that level of analytics and communications skill for football, baseball, and basketball, and offered a subscription that got you writing, podcasts, video breakdowns, and frequent live chats with subscribers, I would pay for that.
There are many who do elements of that: The Ringer does some of this very well, but seems increasingly focused on the gambling element (which is probably where the money is...), and doesn't have a subscriber interactive element. Baseball Prospectus obviously does writing that is deeply analytical, but my opinion is that a lot of their writing - and definitely the podcasts - are really dry in their delivery.
It has taken quite a few years, but I believe a critical mass of the public is now accustomed to having to pay for quality content, and are willing to do so. But, unless you are the NY Times, the Washington Post, the WSJ, and a handful of regional publications (the Boston Globe is one such example), the way to get subscribers to pay is probably not going to be from being good at a broad product; it will be by being outstanding at a very focused product. My sense is that The Athletic is trying to be the NY Times of sports journalism - but the NY Times has well over a century of that status going for it before the digitization of news as a head start. I'm not sure The Athletic could get there...so instead of trying to be the NY Times of sports, just go sell it to the NY Times and let them offer it as an add-on to their current subscription products.
Sports itself? Like, if sports programming left television entirely and was only available in person or online, I'd probably pay for it online. But I'm paying for it now (on cable) as it is.
It’s hard as hell to actually find a real newspaper anymore. Reuters and BBC went hard left years ago but I love the BBC world news on TV. Bloomberg is ok. RCP is excellent across all the spectrums they cover trying to cover multiple views of the same topic and they have great breadth of topic coverage. But it isn’t news, it’s opinion. Good unbiased news coverage is hard to find anywhere
I wonder what that thing is then that comes delivered every day in a blue wrapper onto my porch, with News/Business/Sports/Arts/Food/Science/Style sections....
You may not agree with the NYT's Opinions sections or what is chooses to cover and promote most vigorously as news (and believe me--I don't either), but on today's front page were articles on:
--Biden's address on the one-year anniversary of the Jan 6 "demonstration";
--the conspiracy theories/revisionism on the right about the "demonstration"---that it was peaceful, that the violence was instigated by "antifa," that it was a response to overwhelming evidence of a "stolen election," etc.; one can dismiss this as propaganda, but it's filled with quotes explaining viewpoints and factual reporting and provides context for why Jan 06 is viewed so differently by different people.
--Putin sending troops to Kazakhstan;
--Health-policy folks urging the U.S. to re-envision its Covid strategy;
--China's lockdown of Xi'an, a city of 13 million.
That all sounds like news to me. Then there are six pages of international news---Germany, Chile, England, Pakistan, China, Japan, Italy, Australia, more Kazakhstan, and South Korea.
I mean come on, like any large and influential institution, it has its biases, its blind spots, its questionable or downright poor decisions, and it certainly has an undeniable political slant. But it is a newspaper, and it is staffed by serious journalists and editors who generally try to abide by a set of professional ethics.
Is that supposed to be some sort of disqualifier?
Didn't some Republican complain that "facts have a liberal bias"?
And "liberal" though the NYT may be (I would argue it's more like "protect the status quo, whether from attacks from the left or the right") they've got Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat--actual conservatives--as columnists in their Opinions section, and they regularly run pieces from Republicans, both actual officeholders as well as representatives of right wing groups.
What is the "conservative" equivalent?
There are likely some (though none as good overall). But Rush Limbaugh's show sure as hell wasn't one of them.
It absolutely leans hard left on its editorial pages, a lean that also creeps in to the stories it chooses to run outside the opinion pages. But it's still one of the absolute best places for reporting, and suggesting that it's not a newspaper is just profoundly stupid.
And I also got the quote wrong: it should be "reality has a liberal bias."
Someone doesn't have the vaguest idea of what "hard left" means. I'm not sure any newspaper in the U.S. has qualified for that description since The Guardian went away in 1992. Maybe if any of the diminutive Marxist-Leninist or Maoist sects are still publishing ...
Edit: Wikipedia advises that The Industrial Worker is still coming out. So there's that.
Please. I'm not talking in reference to the rest of the world, or even historically, which should be pretty damn obvious. In the U.S. media landscape, the NYT is about as left-leaning as you'll find among mainstream newspapers.
*This just in -- words having meanings!
Mostly it’s a “markets” paper.
His lawyers were democratic operatives. The real special counsel has now completely debunked the entire Russian narrative. You would have thought Mueller’s team, if honest, would have sniffed out the Clinton skullduggery in about 15 minutes. Strassel isn’t trumpist for pointing out corruption in Mueller’s team which has now proven to be 100% correct. It’s more or less fact at this point. The onlynpwraonnwho colluded with the Russians in 2016 was Hillary Clinton’s campaign team. That’s fact.
But I'm asking the "onlynpwraonnwho" crowd for more feedback.
http://blog.bewilderinglypuzzles.com/
https://www.brendanemmettquigley.com/
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