davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Who the effin 'ell wants to read about that galoot anyway?
Mass exodus of UK football journalists to American website 'The Atheletic'
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Who the effin 'ell wants to read about that galoot anyway?
Just noticed our mate O’Keefe has done an article on Kean for The Athletic.
KaiserEFC
Player Valuation: £70m
It’s alright so far. Nothing special but I’d expect it to improve as the season goes on. I think if people are looking for this mythical “insider ITK information” that for some reason fans are obsessed with nowadays then they’re looking in the wrong place. It just seems to be all about a better quality of journalistic writing and being more tailor made to your club.
That's exactly what it is.
PaulPowersTash
Player Valuation: £15m
I subscribe to it. But to be honest I am already get a little tired of the daily sycophantic articles on all things Liverpool.
It is genuinely almost daily now.
Not a lot different to the standard newspaper media. A few interesting articles but not worth what they are charging.
I'll give it a few more weeks and see how it goes. I'm not holding my breath...
It is genuinely almost daily now.
Not a lot different to the standard newspaper media. A few interesting articles but not worth what they are charging.
I'll give it a few more weeks and see how it goes. I'm not holding my breath...
Black Belt Jones
Player Valuation: £25m
How wide a remit is it for sport - do you get articles on all sorts of stuff or is it just football football football?
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
No it isn't. It's by professional writers who take their duty to truth seriously and arent dependent on clubs pr departments to research it.
Oddly, they like to be paid for their time.
dead_soft
Player Valuation: £35m
This is top, top, quality wind-up fun
D
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Think it's many sports. Sure I seen a basketball article linked on Twitter.
dead_soft
Player Valuation: £35m
UK is just football for now. US, which you get access to with UK, covers more from an American perspective
Sweeneytoad
Player Valuation: £6m
I have to say I've been impressed with it so far, I originally only signed up to read our articles, but have found myself reading quite a lot on the general premier league or other club stories. I think it is still finding it's feet and you can see some journalists are still in click-bait mode - a bad habbit from their previous employment and some poorly constructed articles. The majority though are a lot more in depth and well researched. Not an advert in sight either which already edges it for me. I'll be keeping it for the year, but a promising start so far.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
New Statesman artcle on the Athletic (basically: dont waste £30 on another hack employing corporate whore):
14 AUGUST 2019
How new sport website the Athletic is disrupting Fleet Street
Focusing purely on football, and with a staff of 57 writers and editors, is the new British arm of the start-up any good?
"On 5 August, in anticipation of the start of the new Premier League football season, the American sport website the Athletic launched its British arm with a staff of writers and editors – 57 in all – many of whom had been lured from national newspapers. The reasoning behind this – to all appearances – costly hiring approach was that writers such as Oliver Kay, Amy Lawrence and Daniel Taylor, formerly of the Times, the Guardian and the Observer, were sufficiently valued by readers to justify a subscription fee of £59.99 a year. Another objective was to cause a stir. Almost every British reader who had heard about the Athletic UK prior to it going live had done so because of the trickle of news stories about sign-on fees, equity offerings and all the big names jumping from sinking Fleet Street ships. The company has acquired a reputation for upstart – or start-up – ambition before coming anywhere near to proving its extravagant claims about the depths and rigour of its coverage.
If the idea of the Athletic sounds counterintuitive, then this has been part of its appeal to investors. One person’s zany idea is another’s “narrative violation”, in the words of Bedrock Capital, a venture capitalist firm – the narrative being that “mass-market readers are not willing to pay for written content online”. For the time being, the Athletic’s US subscriber base (more than 500,000, with a 90 per cent renewal rate) suggests that the founders, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, were right to pursue their hunch, and that companies such as Bedrock were right to back them. The site is profitable in the majority of its “markets” – nearly 50 American and Canadian cities, where it covers basketball, baseball and American football, among other sports.
When the Athletic started in 2016, it was pitched as the future of sports journalism at a time of dwindling coverage in North America – a state of affairs that the company wouldn’t only exploit but accelerate. Mather told the New York Times that he was going to let “every local paper” bleed, and – shifting metaphors – suck them dry. Ed Malyon, formerly of the Independent and now the Athletic’s UK managing editor, has said that if no other outlet is “offering even a half-decent effort in terms of covering Southampton, or Derby County, or Leeds, then that’s a huge opportunity for us”. Huge? In the US, the Athletic was able to employ correspondents who had been made redundant, and whose coverage wasn’t being replaced. In the UK, it has needed to hire journalists, such as Leeds United specialist Phil Hay from the Yorkshire Evening Post. For the site’s Leeds “market” to turn a profit, by its own definition, it would require enough Leeds fans to subscribe solely to read Hay’s contributions.
Malyon notes that newspapers, in contrast to the Athletic, cannot concentrate solely on sport because of the need to “talk about news and stuff”, while also chiding them for failing to offer employees equity: “You still work your arse off, but you never have any tangible upside.” It might appear odd that the Athletic has appointed a senior executive with such an unworldly attitude towards current-affairs reporting and wage labour, but then the central aim of the company’s self-promotion is to make everything that isn’t the Athletic appear obviously defective and wrong. There’s been a bizarre emphasis on the ubiquity and irritation of online advertising, though the Athletic cannot rule out using ads in future, if it wants to achieve long-term sustainability, rather than expanding at a loss before selling to a conglomerate (as happened with Bleacher Report in 2012).
Then there’s the implicit promise that the Athletic UK will offer good British football journalism for the first time ever while providing the same kinds of articles its journalists were, until recently, writing for other outlets. Having hired editors and writers from mainstream publications, the website wants to suggest that the deficiencies of existing sports coverage lie solely with those institutions. One sin, a representative from the Athletic told the BBC, was forcing correspondents to attend “those post-match press conferences”.
Following the first Premier League weekend, the Athletic UK offered articles on subjects such as what Unai Emery must do to earn another contract as Arsenal coach, and how much Tottenham improved after Christian Eriksen came on from the bench. There was even evidence that journalists had paid attention to what managers had said after the game. It’s hard to resist noting that having reportedly failed to lure Barney Ronay from the Guardian or Jonathan Liew from the Independent, the Athletic UK has no one you could call a writer in the meaningful sense. Its best asset is the tactics analyst Michael Cox, who has already contributed eight articles, including an exceptional essay on the recently retired Dutch winger Arjen Robben – though it could easily have appeared at Cox’s previous home, ESPN FC. Every reader of football coverage will hope that the site overhauls the landscape as much as has been promised, and not provide – as initial indicators might suggest – the familiar mixture of rumours, myth-making, puffery and sporadic insight, only at far greater expense."
14 AUGUST 2019
How new sport website the Athletic is disrupting Fleet Street
Focusing purely on football, and with a staff of 57 writers and editors, is the new British arm of the start-up any good?
"On 5 August, in anticipation of the start of the new Premier League football season, the American sport website the Athletic launched its British arm with a staff of writers and editors – 57 in all – many of whom had been lured from national newspapers. The reasoning behind this – to all appearances – costly hiring approach was that writers such as Oliver Kay, Amy Lawrence and Daniel Taylor, formerly of the Times, the Guardian and the Observer, were sufficiently valued by readers to justify a subscription fee of £59.99 a year. Another objective was to cause a stir. Almost every British reader who had heard about the Athletic UK prior to it going live had done so because of the trickle of news stories about sign-on fees, equity offerings and all the big names jumping from sinking Fleet Street ships. The company has acquired a reputation for upstart – or start-up – ambition before coming anywhere near to proving its extravagant claims about the depths and rigour of its coverage.
If the idea of the Athletic sounds counterintuitive, then this has been part of its appeal to investors. One person’s zany idea is another’s “narrative violation”, in the words of Bedrock Capital, a venture capitalist firm – the narrative being that “mass-market readers are not willing to pay for written content online”. For the time being, the Athletic’s US subscriber base (more than 500,000, with a 90 per cent renewal rate) suggests that the founders, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, were right to pursue their hunch, and that companies such as Bedrock were right to back them. The site is profitable in the majority of its “markets” – nearly 50 American and Canadian cities, where it covers basketball, baseball and American football, among other sports.
When the Athletic started in 2016, it was pitched as the future of sports journalism at a time of dwindling coverage in North America – a state of affairs that the company wouldn’t only exploit but accelerate. Mather told the New York Times that he was going to let “every local paper” bleed, and – shifting metaphors – suck them dry. Ed Malyon, formerly of the Independent and now the Athletic’s UK managing editor, has said that if no other outlet is “offering even a half-decent effort in terms of covering Southampton, or Derby County, or Leeds, then that’s a huge opportunity for us”. Huge? In the US, the Athletic was able to employ correspondents who had been made redundant, and whose coverage wasn’t being replaced. In the UK, it has needed to hire journalists, such as Leeds United specialist Phil Hay from the Yorkshire Evening Post. For the site’s Leeds “market” to turn a profit, by its own definition, it would require enough Leeds fans to subscribe solely to read Hay’s contributions.
Malyon notes that newspapers, in contrast to the Athletic, cannot concentrate solely on sport because of the need to “talk about news and stuff”, while also chiding them for failing to offer employees equity: “You still work your arse off, but you never have any tangible upside.” It might appear odd that the Athletic has appointed a senior executive with such an unworldly attitude towards current-affairs reporting and wage labour, but then the central aim of the company’s self-promotion is to make everything that isn’t the Athletic appear obviously defective and wrong. There’s been a bizarre emphasis on the ubiquity and irritation of online advertising, though the Athletic cannot rule out using ads in future, if it wants to achieve long-term sustainability, rather than expanding at a loss before selling to a conglomerate (as happened with Bleacher Report in 2012).
Then there’s the implicit promise that the Athletic UK will offer good British football journalism for the first time ever while providing the same kinds of articles its journalists were, until recently, writing for other outlets. Having hired editors and writers from mainstream publications, the website wants to suggest that the deficiencies of existing sports coverage lie solely with those institutions. One sin, a representative from the Athletic told the BBC, was forcing correspondents to attend “those post-match press conferences”.
Following the first Premier League weekend, the Athletic UK offered articles on subjects such as what Unai Emery must do to earn another contract as Arsenal coach, and how much Tottenham improved after Christian Eriksen came on from the bench. There was even evidence that journalists had paid attention to what managers had said after the game. It’s hard to resist noting that having reportedly failed to lure Barney Ronay from the Guardian or Jonathan Liew from the Independent, the Athletic UK has no one you could call a writer in the meaningful sense. Its best asset is the tactics analyst Michael Cox, who has already contributed eight articles, including an exceptional essay on the recently retired Dutch winger Arjen Robben – though it could easily have appeared at Cox’s previous home, ESPN FC. Every reader of football coverage will hope that the site overhauls the landscape as much as has been promised, and not provide – as initial indicators might suggest – the familiar mixture of rumours, myth-making, puffery and sporadic insight, only at far greater expense."
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dandydan
Player Valuation: £40m
Name one journalist who has asked where the Arteta money is!
Berenger
Player Valuation: £8m
There hasn't been one media outlet in the UK covering football in the last 30 years that has been able to avoid the basic economics of the market: the vast majority of customers support United, Liverpool and (to a lesser extent) Arsenal, so the content must reflect that to maximise profit.
From that point ensues a downward spiral, and you end up with (e.g.) the BBC putting out more coverage of Klopp's Joey Tribiani impressions than transfer window activity.
I can't see that being any different for the Athletic.
From that point ensues a downward spiral, and you end up with (e.g.) the BBC putting out more coverage of Klopp's Joey Tribiani impressions than transfer window activity.
I can't see that being any different for the Athletic.
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