Well done oft you can copy paste everything interesting here.

I'd be happy to mate, I'll even undercut the Athletic and charge just £1 a month from anyone who wants an article.

Just gone through this Athletic. Interesting articles and a helpful format. No wading through irrelevant content.

Biggest winner of this window: Lequipe. Broke the Pepe news way before others, Luiz news first and Coutinho although the latter was half true as we rejected him in the end.

Oracle is still the best out there as well

first month of athetlc is free. no brainer.

Coutinho would have made sense now that we have let Iwobi leave.

Clrnc wrote:

Biggest winner of this window: Lequipe. Broke the Pepe news way before others, Luiz news first and Coutinho although the latter was half true as we rejected him in the end.

Oracle is still the best out there as well

I think Orny retained his crown with a last minute K.O.

ornstein was sketchy this window, but breaking the news that the dybala deal was off was a fine send-off. saw that tweet pop onto my feed in real-time and immediately busted out laughing

So....has anyone subscribed to the Athletic for football news? How is it?

Haven't got it. Know a few people who did, they say its great if you also like US sports.

It's free for a month
https://theathletic.com

i subbed for a year with the 50% offer, but I'd definitely check out the trial if you're not sure. I generally have stopped bothering to read the sports pages of mainstream papers because of the quality of the content, so this fills a gap for me.

Mirth wrote:

So....has anyone subscribed to the Athletic for football news? How is it?

I went in and read an article on Liverpool and Klopp. Really well-written. Also the fact that I was able to go in and customize it so it only displays articles about Premier League, Arsenal, Lakers, Juve and Real. It’s a massive benefit to open a sports feed and daily email with no noise, just intriguing titles from guys like Michael Cox. They’re pushing their 50% special now

Claudius wrote:

Mirth wrote:

So....has anyone subscribed to the Athletic for football news? How is it?

I went in and read an article on Liverpool and Klopp. Really well-written. Also the fact that I was able to go in and customize it so it only displays articles about Premier League, Arsenal, Lakers, Juve and Real. It’s a massive benefit to open a sports feed and daily email with no noise, just intriguing titles from guys like Michael Cox. They’re pushing their 50% special now

the customization is actually the best feature of the site, imo. you pick the teams/leagues you want to follow, and that is what you see when you log in. you can still explore other stuff, but every day i am getting 5-6 articles about the teams i care about and i can read those first, and that is typically all i have time to read. works well.

its jarring going from the athletic back to something like espn, with tons of autoplay flash videos and ads all over the place.

if you are still on the fence, 50% off the athletic right now

theathletic.com/laborday50

i'll keep posting about it, because i really do hope it is the future of journalism. clickbait and annoying ads are awful and if journalism can move to a pure subscription model, i think its better for everyone.

The Athletic don't need astroturfers because their subscribers are doing it for free!

In all seriousness I felt kind of bad when reading the articles posted on here for free, but when I read what their higher-ups are saying I immediately feel much better.

"We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them."

Quincy Abeyie wrote:

The Athletic don't need astroturfers because their subscribers are doing it for free!

In all seriousness I felt kind of bad when reading the articles posted on here for free, but when I read what their higher-ups are saying I immediately feel much better.

"We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them."

to be fair, the guy who said that said it a few years ago and has apologized numerous times for the remark.

Pure MBA thinking. Equally brilliant and sad.

(I've got one of those)

An apology doesn't count for much when it's their business model does it? I'm not familiar with them but buying the best/most renowned journalists from the competition and then growing market share by burning money with implausibly cheap initial fees sounds suspiciously similar to the attrition model employed by investor bankrolled companies like Uber, Airbnb etc.

Race to the fucking bottom.

I also see a lot of similarities to the "disruptive business model" but it's slightly different in that, unlike the taxi industry, traditional journalism was struggling to adjust to the new tools of the digital age especially twitter which made lucrative exclusives very hard to come by.

jones wrote:

An apology doesn't count for much when it's their business model does it? I'm not familiar with them but buying the best/most renowned journalists from the competition and then growing market share by burning money with implausibly cheap initial fees sounds suspiciously similar to the attrition model employed by investor bankrolled companies like Uber, Airbnb etc.

Yeah. To correct Capi, it’s not MBA thinking. That term has always been so lazy. It’s a combination of two things. First, what you note, Jones. This post-Amazon obsession with building monopolistic scale that is backed up by this new breed of super fund like SoftBank. On the one hand, this is advantageous because it allows us to build scale companies quickly, but on the other hand these market-dominating companies are creating real difficulties for existing competitors, suppliers and their various employees while often not justifying valuations.

Second, the journalistic industry has to solve monetisation. Something like Patreon looks like it could work for creatives. We similarly need a model that works for quality journalism where we will be willing to pay for quality writing. These guys have the fortune of not having to worry about the overhead and deadlines of the printing press. Completely changes finances and incentives for writers. But is that our future?

If it works that’s great. The main way to then determine if it is too powerful would just be to look at the share of readership of various markets. Eg what percentage of people are reading English football news on Athletic vs other sites. I do think the payment will stop it being monopolistic. The big monopolitisc tech platforms typically depend on free or predatory services.

to some degree, their model makes sense in terms of price. offer a nice promotional discount where people are only paying a few dollars a month for the product for their first year. they become attached to the content they are receiving that when their promo price expires, they are going to determine the product is worth paying more for, so they renew their subscription for the full price.

since the company is private, no one really knows what their retention rate is, but i saw somewhere the number 80% was thrown around. that is pretty solid.

the newspaper model is flawed, because it relies on ads. for some people, having to watch a bunch of ads or click through to read an article isnt a problem. for me, its a problem. ive used an ad-blocker and flash blocker in google chrome for years because i hate intrusive popups, and i hate autoplay flash ads/videos. when i click on a link, i want to just read the article, i dont want to spend a few minutes dicking around to get to the actual content.

digital sites like ESPN and regional sports network websites in the US are problematic because they are either producing generic content with no analysis, or they are creating clickbait just to get people to the site and then subject them to a bunch of ads. if you just want to read recaps of sporting events or the clickbaity hot take piece, then free sources like ESPN are probably sufficient. patreon content creators and a site like the athletic is far superior. i originally signed up in 2017 i think, for a promo rate, and ive renewed my subscription at full sticker price twice because it gives me what i want, and in the grand scheme of things, like $8 a month is nothing for me.

frankly, im sort of surprised a model like the athletic has not been duplicated for politics and news coverage in the US. digital sites like the washington post (which i subscribe to) are still just a big collection of lots of different things, and most people probably are not reading all of the content there, just like they dont read the newspaper cover to cover. national writers, international specialists, climate specialists, and politics reporters from the major papers (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, USA Today, etc) could be poached and a new site could be started, and id pay for that. newspapers, even in digital form, are still bloated and still clickbaity, and they still have terrible things like op-ed sections, as we are seeing with this latest bret stephens disaster.

the newspaper industry isnt going to fix itself. the last 10 years or so have very clearly illustrated that. new organizations are needed to find new and better ways to deliver information in a way that makes sense in 2019 and beyond. from a sports perspective, i hope the athletic succeeds. they've collected serious journalists and given them freedom to not write clickbait and hot take garbage. and i think we're all better for it.

I think it's a good model myself, I just don't like the bragging of putting local newspapers out of business. If he's apologized then I assume it's only because of the backlash that's come from said comments. When corporations apologize for something it's because of getting caught or backlash, not because they've suddenly seen the errors of their ways.

mdgoonah41 wrote:

frankly, im sort of surprised a model like the athletic has not been duplicated for politics and news coverage in the US. digital sites like the washington post (which i subscribe to) are still just a big collection of lots of different things, and most people probably are not reading all of the content there, just like they dont read the newspaper cover to cover. national writers, international specialists, climate specialists, and politics reporters from the major papers (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, USA Today, etc) could be poached and a new site could be started, and id pay for that. newspapers, even in digital form, are still bloated and still clickbaity, and they still have terrible things like op-ed sections, as we are seeing with this latest bret stephens disaster.

Could be harder in politics. In your country, for example, it is refreshing to be able to read a spectrum of views. One expects more liberal views on platforms like Slate and Vox and more moderate perspectives at a WSJ. These journalists thrive from being able to collaborate with each other on investigative pieces and podcasts. In addition, it’s a signal to readers for perspectives they are aligned to and patterns they prefer for consuming news. Then layer the regional politics atop that as well. It’s a bit more complex than sports journalism where users’ primary orientation will be “I want to follow teams X, Y, Z”. Even the experts are typically devoid of biases, they just have depth in a specific topic like tactics ( eg Cox). So maybe in politics it’s better to have a perspective and build scale that way which gives rise to competition.

part of the problem with "news"m IMO, is that there should not be a political slant. and if you read hard news, like the actual news articles written at the big traditional papers, there isnt a whole lot of color at all, its more of a tick tock and reporting of the facts. and that is what i care about.

if you took the most tuned in hard news reporters at the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, WSJ, USA Today, rolling stone, and newsday and you just had them write news stories, using their sources, contacts and experience, that information would be worth the price it costs. the reason that people think the WSJ is "conservative" or right leaning is because of their editorial board. and honestly, there might not be a more antiquated concept in 2019 than newspaper editorial boards. there are a slew of amazing hard news journalists who either currently work for or worked at the WSJ. the other stuff, the opinion stuff, is garbage and is something i wouldnt pay a cent for.

if i want to read progressive analysis of the current issues, i'll read vox, but often times that isnt what i really even want to bother with. id like to open a tab, click on a site, and get 10 relevant, well reported news stories that explain to me what is happening in US news, US politics, and world news. id like to get that without having to read shitty op-eds, or overwrought style section pieces or much of the other filler that still permeates "the news" here in the US

mdgoodah cooking

The long and the short of it is the business model is to destroy all competition and then act as a monopoly.

Which sports do you think they’ll do this gor? All major American sports? And European football as well?

I cannot say with certainty but would imagine it would make financial sense to pick and choose. That line of discussion is also premature as it hasn't been established what their intentions are or whether they can be as successful as uber. I expect journalists to offer much more resistance than uber, for example, faced as they are more united and know the effects of that business model will not be positive for all.

I don't think there is something such as "hard news". When you report something you can act like you're completely detached from whatever you're reporting but the fact is there is no such thing as neutrality as a journalist. There are events which you report, and other things which you don't or just mention in passing because they're regarded as granted, standard etc. That already is a political decision by the journalist whether they realise it or not, e.g. do you take US military presence abroad as a natural occurrence without any lawful mandates or do you not, do you accept the narrative that Russia got Trump elected despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (bogus intelligence dossiers, bogus reports about said dossiers, outright lies like the power plant garbage etc). There's only one side that's helped by an ostensible removal of a political component from news reporting

By the way there are plenty of smaller websites who do fine with donations, I'd argue most websites with a left leaning rely on that kind of financing and do well enough to survive at least. Then there's also the possibility to fund authors by buying their books. Finally the app Feedly is quite useful to gather articles from different news websites and incorporating them into its interface without any ads or pop ups.

Claudius wrote:

jones wrote:

An apology doesn't count for much when it's their business model does it? I'm not familiar with them but buying the best/most renowned journalists from the competition and then growing market share by burning money with implausibly cheap initial fees sounds suspiciously similar to the attrition model employed by investor bankrolled companies like Uber, Airbnb etc.

Yeah. To correct Capi, it’s not MBA thinking. That term has always been so lazy. It’s a combination of two things. First, what you note, Jones. This post-Amazon obsession with building monopolistic scale that is backed up by this new breed of super fund like SoftBank. On the one hand, this is advantageous because it allows us to build scale companies quickly, but on the other hand these market-dominating companies are creating real difficulties for existing competitors, suppliers and their various employees while often not justifying valuations.

Second, the journalistic industry has to solve monetisation. Something like Patreon looks like it could work for creatives. We similarly need a model that works for quality journalism where we will be willing to pay for quality writing. These guys have the fortune of not having to worry about the overhead and deadlines of the printing press. Completely changes finances and incentives for writers. But is that our future?

If it works that’s great. The main way to then determine if it is too powerful would just be to look at the share of readership of various markets. Eg what percentage of people are reading English football news on Athletic vs other sites. I do think the payment will stop it being monopolistic. The big monopolitisc tech platforms typically depend on free or predatory services.

Yep, it is a lazy term but it still perfectly encapsulated the posted statement. Had I been a pint or two earlier I may have been arsed to expand my point, but really the quote deserved my utter contempt.