As ESPN Falters, The Athletic Chases Fans Tired of ‘Old Fluff’
bloomberg.com
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ESPN started by laying off ~100 employees, with the biggest cuts coming to writers in their declining coverage of baseball and hockey.
Fox Sports, who is trying to become the Pepsi to ESPN's Coke, then followed by laying off every writer on staff in their "pivot to video" (go to their home page now, and you will not find a single link to a text piece).
Vice Sports then joined the party last week by closing shop as part of Vice's expansion into international markets at the cost of getting rid of their sports editorial team.
Not sports directly but MTV did the same thing with their writing staff, including a lot of their high profile writers like Holly Anderson.
With all of these being part of the magical "pivot to video," you have to think it's mainly driven by optimistic hopes that video CPMs will rise in a way that display ads have not for publishers over the last 10 years.
ESPN's constant focus on TMZ-like coverage for sports has put a bad taste in my mouth. I don't care about the picture Lebron posted of his breakfast on Instagram. I don't really even care about the breaking news. Finding out about a trade a day later rather than the minute it happens has absolutely zero impact on my life.
I want highlights from the games I couldn't see, I want some analysis from experts or insiders, and that's about it. Keeping it to just a few articles a day I think will be better for sports journalism in the long run. No need to manufacture content to fill the gaps in a 24-hour day.
As a big college football fan though, your comment highlights one of the challenges I think they face with the "go local" strategy.
If the sports news/writing ecosystem were just bland ESPN-type coverage, I think there's a really clear value proposition. The reality is that there are a ton of other players with a local voice that users can get to for free (from the old school local beat writers to SB Nation's sites that represent ever major local team).
The bet they're making seems to be that there's room for a quality content provider, and I hope that ends up being true.
As an aside, some of the highest quality stuff I see is from bloggers/amateurs who follow sports and write about it as a hobby. There are people who write a dozen or two articles a year with incredible breakdowns containing numbers, vidoes, strategy, etc and it is incredible.
>As an aside, some of the highest quality stuff I see is from bloggers/amateurs who follow sports and write about it as a hobby. There are people who write a dozen or two articles a year with incredible breakdowns containing numbers, vidoes, strategy, etc and it is incredible.
I agree with this. There's some really good stuff out there. I also think it's worth mentioning Jon Gruden. He does a great job of breaking down game tape while still reaching a wide audience. I'd love to see more like him. My ultimate hope is that Peyton Manning gets his own show breaking down film (of both NFL games and his commercials).
Now, Twitter has somewhat made Lists a second class citizen in it's UI, but it's just a couple extra button press to get to it ( on mobile ).
In which case, I actually just scroll through chronologically and read through what the news/insights/commentary has been since the last time I was there.
And someone from the Boston market just partnered with them to start https://www.BostonSportsJournal.com
I actually subscribe to the Post-Gazette for my local sports news. I think Ed Bouchette (despite some of his flaws) is quite a solid beatwriter. Sadly, they pulled Dave Molinari from the Pens beat. This also allows me to get local and national news from a newspaper, so it is a win-win for me. I'd encourage others to do the same, especially if you have good reporters on the local sports beat.
It is also my interpretation that had Grantland and Simmons not been so intertwined, it may have had a better shot at surviving the messy Simmons/ESPN divorce.
not sure what that says about the economics of long form sports journalism
Here is the link to his podcast section on The Ringer: https://theringer.com/bill-simmons-podcast-d3868264a984
[0]: www.espncricinfo.com
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cricket/comments/6otgno/fuck_espn_f...
To be honest, I don't think I have ever seen anyone making more than $200 or so a month (which is probably better than if they were CPM only but not enough for a real sportswriter to pay much more than their internet bill unfortunately).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SB_Nation
Honestly, that may be what's killing sportswriting -- at least on the big TV network sites. The networks don't have the resources to compete with 30 different web sites -- one for each MLB team, each with its own staff and with their own distinct fan communities. The web makes it possible for each one of these sites to narrowcast.
And then why do you need ESPN?
Hopefully a VC 'growth above all else' mindset doesn't force them to expand beyond a profitable enthusiast niche.
Have you tried the Canadian sports news sites? Hockey is definitely the most covered sport here.
Maybe I'm way off here but I trust individual journalists much more than individual journalists under a corporate master.
For example, I'd gladly pay Glen Greenwald 49 cents/mo or 5 dollars/yr whatever for exclusive (not edited by corporate masters) content from him.
I know things like news letters exist but the only ones I've ever seen are talking about aliens or stock picks.
I can go on Cleveland.com (the plain dealer website) and find quality coverage of Cleveland sports for free.
Narrow almost always wins in a situation like this. Traditional local news has everything to lose, while they simultaneously flail about in a death-spasm as their business model continues to melt out from under them.
The Athletic will be able to leverage one profitable market to kill the local sports coverage in another market they want to enter. Scale it up to a couple dozen markets, and they'll have the ability to easily enter any new market they choose and take down the local competition by a dozen different means (eg poaching writing talent en masse). If I were them, as I build up profitable locations, I'd then intentionally run at a loss in new markets and hammer the local competitors (who mostly don't have other markets to lean on). It's an extraordinarily easy business line to follow on how to vanquish existing local sports coverage.
But your point makes sense that as a business, the local media has the disadvantage of using resources in other areas of "news", vs. focusing exclusively on sports.
So, "targeting" these cities would have to include recruiting these people already working there. Otherwise, initially I would always be able to get up to date and "inside" information from the established sources.
I'm just thinking out loud, but essentially, this all depends on what the meaning of "focusing on" means, as the local sports media individuals are certainly focused on their local teams.