re: The New York Times buying The Athletic for $550 million.

I totally understand why people would consider this awful news but the most use I get from the athletic is really just the insiders for each team I follow. I don’t read too many opinion pieces (which I’d expect to turn into shite)

Also have great fantasy baseball content so as long as they keep that I’ll stay subscribed

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Were their payroll costs that insane?

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I would guess that the travel expenses for beat writers is pretty big.

I wish more newspapers, sites, etc were able to implement a subscription format that allowed me to only buy the articles I'm interested in. Like with The Advocate, if I could subscribe to only the articles tagged for LSU baseball for $1 month, they would get $12 more from me than they are currently getting. It would also help them know what coverage people value more and what writers people value more.

the renewal date always sneaks up on me

I can’t wait to read what Travis Gregory Stano has to say about NIL

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The Athletic was one of the few purely sports sources without woketardness.

Sadly that appears to be coming to an end.

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It was already happening and already probably hurting their bottom line. It's been discussed a lot on here the last couple of years because they had numerous writers deviate from their distinctive brand of pure-sports, no drama, no politics writing with a long of long form.

Of course, it's probably hard for a sports outlet to sustain that, because the woke prevalence in sports journalism is so high. So to get "names" you'll have to get them to commit to keeping it between the lines, which they won't, and then the outlet has to can them for politics or live with it. And the Athletic was doing the latter.

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They’ll ruin it within a year.

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Technically it’s already “ruined” as a business given how much money it’s losing.

Inevitably they will come in and want it to turn a profit so they will begin cutting salaries and increasing subscription cost while cutting off the specials and deals on subscriptions. Which will feel dumb as the consumer and likely end the business momentum it has (and maybe the business entirely) but it will still be a perfectly rational business decision When you look at the bottom line

It’s kind of like MoviePass. They were operating on such a loss for so long just to keep getting more subscribers and more funding that it created an imbalance where the only way to change the direction of the company is to betray the value you used to gain those customers in the first place

Goddamnit,

Just renewed. I love some articles in The Athletic.

Bummer. The NYT is an absolute rag of a news organization, despite their incredible crossword puzzles. This isn't political for me either, they have just terrible content.

Yea it’s good. The times has pretty good sportswriters too like Rory Smith. Of course the idiots on this board are so twisted over politics they’re expecting it to be nothing but content akin to the Undefeated

I will be cancelling my athletic subscription