Since launching The Athletic NHL and The Athletic Toronto more than a year ago, I’ve consistently received two different reactions to what The Athletic has started in many markets across North America.
The first response has been very positive. Most people get it, like it and are on-board, with supportive comments, suggestions for great writers to add to our team, and ideas on how we can improve.
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We love those people.
The second group?
They usually have a different take, something along the lines of “Paywall? I will NEVER pay for sports content!”
Which is understandable. We’re still relatively new, and a pay-to-read model is still a nascent concept – especially for sports. As I learned writing about analytics on the Maple Leafs beat circa 2012-13, anything new is probably controversial.
So I think it’s worth explaining why we are the way we are.
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One of the things I’ve made an effort to do the last few years is learn more about the business side of how the media operates. A lot of people in the traditional media feel helpless the way the business is floundering, and my response to that was to get as much information as I could and at least understand the why behind those struggles. I was on audience committees at my former newspaper, used analytics to track how stories performed in terms of engagement and followed industry trends in terms of business models.
What I learned along the way is there is a big disconnect between what the public believes is happening in media and what is actually happening.
Journalists are not losing their jobs because they are bad at what they do. The No. 1 killer of newspapers and websites – and radio and television appear to be next – is ad rates, in print and online. As Facebook and Google corner the ad market, and companies increasingly turn to social avenues to promote themselves, ad rates are dropping, often at exceptional rates.
In the (recent) past, you could attempt to make money online by going for scale – a high number of clicks – but that is becoming increasingly difficult. Even a very high-end website, like the New York Times, has online ad rates of about $8 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Most newspapers and websites are much lower than that – and the number is falling every year.
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Even very well-read stories for large outlets may only generate $75 or $100 in revenue online. Not enough to pay a writer for a day’s work, let alone add in an editor, or any other costs associated with a large company producing content.
And those are the ones that hit relatively big. Others about more niche subjects, or that require a high level of sophistication, research and time, would generate even less revenue relative to the cost to produce them, in that click-per-penny model.
That, on a basic level, is why newspapers like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail are pursuing a subscription model. They have to in order to produce the content that makes those brands what they are. They have done the math that shows getting even two or three subscribers for a story is worth more than 20,000 hits.
The alternative is to chase web pennies – and bleed millions of dollars a year.
We know that won’t last. We know now many of those outlets will fail.
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The Athletic is different. We are not ESPN or TSN, who can have auto-play video ads and push customers to their cable networks for major sources of revenue. We’re focused on fans who want high quality, in-depth coverage of their teams, content that isn’t designed to service advertisers or clicks. It’s designed solely to be informative and entertaining.
The Athletic would not happen on an ad revenue model. Trust me, I’ve looked into it. So far, we’ve seen that it can work through low-cost subscriptions. By all indications, we’ll be around for a long time.
Many of the writers on The Athletic’s staff were laid off before joining us. They are some of the best writers in the business – reporters like senior writer Dana O’Neil from our Fieldhouse team, lead Raptors writer Eric Koreen, and lead Sixers writer Derek Bodner.
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At a time when sports media outlets are either (a) cutting back coverage or (b) making decisions based on number of clicks generated and not quality – The Athletic has brought in the best of the best. Jon Greenberg and Scott Powers, two gifted writers laid off by ESPN, joined in Jan 2016 to start The Athletic’s original location in Chicago. Legends like Ken Rosenthal and Stewart Mandel, made available when Fox Sports pivoted away from writing, now head up premium national baseball and college coverage, respectively.
Long-time newspaper writers like Tim Kawakami, editor-in-chief of The Athletic Bay Area, and Jason Lloyd, editor-in-chief of The Athletic Cleveland, understood the “fragile times of the newspaper industry” and joined the team because they believe this is “direct line, the next step, the evolution of sports writing.”
Without the pressure of generating clicks or meeting arbitrary deadlines, The Athletic’s editorial team is doing the best work of their careers.
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In the U.S., more than half the jobs in the news industry have disappeared in the last 15 years. Canada has lost more than one-third of its journalists in the past six years. I would bet that number is even higher in sports, which is often not considered an integral section by the bean counters despite being well-read.
Some of the sports sections across North America have closed. Others that employed 25-plus people a decade ago are down to five or six. And there are very few young people getting jobs in this climate.
While some of the blogs and websites do very good work, their contributors rarely receive a living wage for doing so.
Putting up a paywall is not The Athletic being greedy. We remain very much a start-up and all of the money we receive right now goes to the product. On a basic level, the more that people subscribe, the more we can invest in bringing good sports journalism to other markets and making the product more valuable for subscribers.
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I definitely understand that not every sports fan wants to pay for content. Not everyone wants to read Marcus Thompson‘s thought-provoking story on the Warriors trip to San Quentin, or the heart-wrenching coverage by Katie Strang of the reckoning of Larry Nassar at the hands of his victims. Not everyone needs NBA salary cap minutiae, power-play analytics, or video analysis of Jon Gruden’s potential Raiders offense.
The staff at The Athletic believe in our work. And we believe in this business model – in part because we’ve seen the others fail again and again. We believe we have collectively hit on something which can reverse a brutal trend in our industry, and we are betting our careers on it.
I hope our readers keep proving us right. I thank those who are behind us already.
– James Mirtle, editor-in-chief The Athletic Canada
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