trwi7 wrote:MikeIsGood wrote:I don't doubt that The Athletic has some good stuff, but it has been doomed from the get-go. Once they run out of VC, like was pointed out, they won't be able to keep their journalists without raising rates. And they already can't get enough people to subscribe - raising rates won't help. They just aren't profitable.
They also opened up saying they were so much different from newspapers and they would have so many in depth stories that you couldn't find anywhere else.
Well, all they did was hire a bunch of writers from newspapers and they have maybe one in depth story that's interesting and worth reading a month and that's really not even close to worth it.
I've found more than one story a month worth reading. Their Liverpool beat writer who they stole from the Liverpool Echo has written a half dozen stories in the past month which were really interesting (including his retrospective on the Brendan Rodgers era in anticipation of our game against them last Saturday). Adding McGinn to the Packers beat was clutch. Their Bucks beat is better than what we've gotten from the MJS in quite a while, IMO.
To me, the advantage to a site like The Athletic is that it gives you a one-stop-shop for all of the sports you follow instead of forcing you to subscribe to multiple different websites and papers. Whether it's profitable in the long run or collapses under its own weight remains to be seen. I hope it succeeds, because it's not like the folks they've hired are going to be able to find decent-paying gigs at newspapers or magazines anymore.