Sports Biblio Digest 2.18.18: The Athletic’s Sports Journalism Gamble
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also in This Issue: The Daytona 500 at 60; Felipe Alou; The Rise of Sabermedicals; Olympic Hockey Without the NHL; Gridiron on the Telly; A Journey Across Antarctica; In Search of Lost Books; Remembering Tito Francona and Wally Moon
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 115, published Feb. 18, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website. To view this newsletter in a browser, click here.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com. You can also follow Sports Biblio on Twitter and hit the “like” button on Facebook.
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I want The Athletic to succeed beyond its founders’ wildest ambitions, its writers’ and editors’ most optimistic hopes and its growing subscriber base’s deepest passions for quality sports journalism.
Its motto—”fall in love with the sports page again”—is simple and brilliant. Its look is clean and uncluttered. No automatic video pop-up ads, newsletter sign-up boxes, or clickbait headlines that would demean a toddler.
The subscription plans are affordable, and when you sign up for one vertical, you get all the rest. It’s a grand bargain for a sports fan who doesn’t want to be bombarded with the above, as well as hot takes, babes, pop culture inanities and LaVar Ball’s latest machinations.
The substantial pockets of Silicon Valley investors who have ponied up at least $8 million for a “startup” that’s now in 14 U.S. cities and seven Canadian markets, and is broadening verticals for Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA, NHL and college football and basketball, are enticing some impressive bylines to come aboard.
Ken Rosenthal, Seth Davis, Stewart Mandel, Peter Gammons, Emma Span, Jayson Stark, Bernie Miklasz, Pierre LeBrun, Jim Bowden, Lisa Olson, Phil Taylor, Nicole Auerbach, Dana O’Neil, Eamonn Brennan, Wendell Barnhouse, among many others.
For The Athletic Ink magazine-style vertical, contributors have included Jeff Pearlman and Wallace Matthews.
As was Tweeted earlier this week, “The Athletic has a bigger payroll than the Athletics.”
Pitchers and catchers reported this week, and new city sites rolled out in Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and San Diego with 20 major league teams now having regular writers for The Athletic. They’re not doing game stories as much as deeper analysis, pieces meant to last longer than the short-attention span of the web.
Many of these writers have been purloined from newspapers, including Pedro Moura, who jumped ship at the Los Angeles Times, which has been in crisis mode. In his debut post for The Athletic, Moura explained it wasn’t a hard decision, and it wasn’t just about the chaos in his former newsroom:
“. . . for me and so many colleagues, it increasingly felt like the structure of modern newspapers conspired to hinder us in the sports department.”
The flexibility of the web, the informality of storyforms, are incredibly liberating. I discovered this more than a dozen years ago, when I left print behind for digital journalism. On my own new local news site, my slogan is “news for the way you live today.” It is imperative that we adapt to this.
While I still remain bullish on online media’s editorial potential, finding ways to make it profitable, and to keep good journalists doing what they do best, has been vexing.
The young, brash co-founders of The Athletic are charging ahead, perhaps a bit arrogantly, especially after one of them, Alex Mather, said this in a profile in The New York Times on October:
“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing.”
Later in same piece he said this:
“The advertising business model does not align with quality. It’s hot takes instead of objective analysis, it’s short-term instead of long-term, it’s serving sponsors instead of users, it’s thinking big instead of great.”
Expansion has kept up at a blistering pace. It’s dizzying.
For anyone who has spent any time in digital news, there are some bracing realities to keep in mind. Local papers are bleeding, and they’re bleeding badly. Mather’s comments about print drew some fire, and he apologized for them. His remarks about advertising bear greater scrutiny.
Like many jumping into the online media fold, he’s convinced that digital advertising isn’t worth chasing if it means inundating readers with the worst aspects of scaled media: the lowest common denominator content.
That’s why The Athletic is hedging a bet that its paywall model will pay off. General interest news outlets are taking a larger gamble when they do this, in my view, because they don’t have enough distinctive content to create scarcity.
The Athletic is trying to re-create some of that scarcity as ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports and other online sports outlets scale back on what they’ve been doing. Quality content for fans, and not advertisers, is a noble aim.
Still, I have my doubts The Athletic can create enough distinctive content, given the glut of other outlets that remain that are offering it for free. Some of them, like Bleacher Report, also have a healthy stable of nationally recognized writers backed by Turner Broadcasting.
This is not a knock on anyone with a byline at The Athletic, and its chief content officer, Paul Fichtenbaum, a refugee of the steadily declining Sports Illustrated enterprise. I know several of those onboard, including a city site editor. They’re already doing a lot of terrific work.
It’s about the business of it all that worries me, especially the quick scaling-up. From 2010-2014, I was part of AOL Patch, a network of community news sites that went from a few dozen to a few hundred in just a matter of months.
That proved to be our undoing, along with a glaring lack of advertising sales. Local news doesn’t scale, and as I’m learning in my new project running an independent community news site, developing relationships with potential advertisers takes an enormous amount of time.
The Athletic isn’t selling ads, but the pressure is on writers to turn out good work on a constant basis to keep subscribers renewing. In some ways, depending on subscriber revenue may be more problematic than working with advertisers. You can show an advertiser metrics; keeping subscribers amounts to a public radio appeal, deeply personal and even emotional.
What those subscription numbers are at this point for The Athletic remain unclear, and they do change rapidly due to the additional sites.
The bigger issue is what The Athletic’s investors are expecting, and how soon they want a return. The Patch experiment was always seen as a long shot, but our prospects quickly soured when a major AOL shareholder dropped a devastating assessment and staged a proxy fight.
AOL won that battle, but lost the war when it sold Patch, and I and hundreds of other editorial employees lost our jobs on a two-minute conference call. It wasn’t a surprise, and our troubles were well-known because AOL was a publicly-held company that had to make some things public.
I write this in hopes that The Athletic really is on to something with its approach. Many of those writers have been jettisoned from ESPN, Sports Illustrated and other legacy media plays. This may be their last chance to be a part of a meaningful project that lasts, that can help bridge the gap in a time of turbulent transition in media.
Another SI alum, John Walters, wrote a brilliant post on his Medium Happy blog this week on the clickbait-infested sports media world, and I urge you to read it all. He’s a contributor to The Athletic, and his harrowing experience at Newsweek (another media tragedy in the making) is a stark reminder of not only what’s been lost, but what little we may be left with of any lasting journalistic merit:
“As someone who writes a blog for free but has no mortgage and no kids to raise, it’s a little easier for me to be idealistic. I can survive on baloney sandwiches for quite some time (besides, I own like, lots of AMZN shares). But at the end of the day, or of your career in journalism, you are what YOU DO, not what you say you are. And if you claim to be a journalist while promoting LeBron and LaVar with more than half your tweets, I’d argue that you’re more of a huckster.”
Walters is a passionate advocate that good storytelling quite often sells itself. That’s why it’s so important for The Athletic to make it, on its founders’ stated terms.
Yet the odds are daunting and the competition is fierce. Sports fans have many choices, even for those sites that have paywalls and subscriptions. Their time and attention is even more scarce.
But the biggest scarcities are healthy sports media businesses that aren’t engaged in a race to the bottom. Rafat Ali, a leading publisher in the vertical media world, preaches finding niches where no one else has gone before.
I hope The Athletic hasn’t already become too broad, and that it won't "nationalize" local sports news. It just doesn't scale, and I learned that the hard way. Independents do matter, as is the case with subscription sports sites in Pittsburgh and Boston.
Ali also has been saying for years that there are no new business models, only new businesses to build and grow and make sustainable. That's what I'm not hearing enough about The Athletic, for as much as I'm rooting for it.
It's trying to find a sweet spot between what the best of newspaper and Sports Illustrated journalism has been and the crude bottom line, but I'm not sure how much room there is. Or how long the opportunity may be to find out.
The Daytona 500 at 60
Sunday’s running of the Daytona 500 comes with a milestone as well as plenty of questions about the future of NASCAR. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is gone, Danica Patrick will be making her last appearance, and the presence of retired other-sport stars Chipper Jones and Peyton Manning (as well as Aaron Rodgers, Patrick’s latest beau) are a strong storyline.
At the Tampa Bay Times, Martin Fennelly writes that NASCAR needs some ghostbusters, and fast:
“Has there ever been a sport more built on good-byes than NASCAR? It's never about hello. And that's a problem.”
Who ya gonna call?
William Byron might be a name worth watching, and not just in the future for the 20-year-old college student. Bubba Wallace, another young talent and the first African-American driver at the Daytona 500 since Wendell Scott in 1969, is the subject of a docudrama on Facebook Watch.
NASCAR ratings, attendance, sponsorships and other gauges have taken a tumble since the recession and haven’t quite recovered. Its fan base isn’t getting any younger. NASCAR head Brian France remains bullish on the circuit’s future, but even longtime watchers are having some doubts.
Veteran NASCAR writer Bob Pockrass noted that only 40 racers have shown up for 40 spots in Sunday’s Daytona 500, removing the thrill of qualifying and a full weekend celebration of the start of a new stock car season:
“For the biggest race of the year, for an event where NASCAR has qualifying races, somebody should enjoy the exhilarating thrill of making the Daytona 500 and somebody else should suffer the disappointment of going home. In a sport where the stars are retiring, TV ratings are declining and attendance hasn't found an uptick in 10 years, this is just another swift kick in the pants, a sign that this sport ain't what it used to be.”
Sports Book News
At the Sports Book Review Center, Budd Bailey examines Felipe Alou’s memoir that will be published April 1 (University of Nebraska Press) and writes that the book’s strength details his struggles early in his career, especially as he dealt with segregation in the minor leagues in the South at the dawn of the Civil Rights era;
At The Atlantic, Karen Crouse, author of the recently published “Norwich,” discusses the dynamics of parenting Olympic athletes.
A Few Good Reads
Alex Belth, devoted curator of classic journalism and friend of this newsletter, has launched The Stacks Reader to house many of these pieces, and there’s already a treasure trove to check out, sports and otherwise: Murray Kempton on Willie Mays, Harry Caray, Dick Young, Roger Angell, Pete Dexter, Paul Hemphill, Mike Royko, Robin Williams, William Styron, Meryl Streep, Albert Brooks and more. He’ll soon be accepting donations, and explains his decision to put all these works in a central place this way:
“What’s here will always be just a fraction of the great journalism that’s been written, but each piece republished online is one fewer piece at risk of being entirely forgotten.”
For the first time in 24 years, no NHL players are competing in Olympic hockey. While the U.S. is fielding recent college stars, Canada has opted to send a journeymen roster that includes 37-year-old Chris Kelly, a member of the Boston Bruins’ 2011 Stanley Cup title team, to defend its gold medal;
At the Salt Lake Tribune, Aaron Falk writes about the USA-Russia men’s hockey game that became a rout, then devolved into something of a brawl, and thinks that Olympic pucks are an impostor without the best of the NHL;
I don’t like to link to ridiculous, pretentious pieces, but author Colin Fleming’s piece at Salon on Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” qualifies as gold-medal rubbish, an incredibly non-serious treatment of The Criterion Collection’s recent release of the film that deserves a much better critique;
This is much better: Chuck Culpepper of The Washington Post on a poignant moment at the end of the men’s 15-kilometer cross-country skiing race, marked by jubilant athletes from “the exotic countries”—Colombia, Ecuador, Morocco, Tonga and Mexico—who’ve formed their own special bond and who were celebrated by the Swiss gold-medalist, a la Roger Federer;
The St. Louis Cardinals are embracing biomedical science to enhance performance, and the so-called “sabermedical” approach includes an analysis of sleep patterns that will help determine its travel schedule. Dr. Robert Butler, director of the Cardinals' performance unit, said he gleaned inspiration for the project reading Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s “Win Forever” book during the off-season;
College football attendance was way down in 2017, the biggest drop in 34 years; but determining the reasons for lower NFL ratings isn’t so simple;
Pete Thamel of Yahoo! Sports goes all breathless about the FBI investigation into alleged corruption in college basketball that from where I sit amounts to NCAA violations more than any broken federal criminal laws.
Passings
Tito Francona, 84, is known to younger baseball fans as the father of current Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona. The elder Francona nearly won the American League batting title while playing for the Indians in 1959, the year his son was born. Tito was an All-Star in 1961 and retired in 1970 with a career batting average of .272 and 125 homers, and also played for eight other teams;
Wally Moon, 87, hit memorable “Moon Shots” that helped the Dodgers win three World Series in Los Angeles. The National League rookie of the year with the Cardinals in 1954, he hit 142 homers in a 12-year career.
Off the Sporting Green
Set aside some time for this: “The White Darkness,” by David Grann at The New Yorker. It’s the story of Henry Worsley, a British military veteran who retraced the steps of Antarctic expedition leader Ernest Shackleton, and later failed in his bid to become the first man to reach the South Pole alone and unaided, in honor of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Grann exquisitely gets at what drives these souls to endure such extraordinary ordeals:
“Worsley, knowing that it was imperative to maintain positive thoughts, recalled family holidays and planting vegetables in the garden. He grew accustomed to the paradox of being reduced to irrelevance in the alien landscape while at the same time feeling acutely aware of oneself: every aching muscle, every joint, every breath, every heartbeat. He said that he preferred breaking track, despite its difficulties, because all you saw in front of you was ‘the infinite beyond.’ ”
Quincy Jones, 84, totally unfiltered and all over the map, talking to Vulture about Michael Jackson, dating Ivanka Trump, his dislike for the Beatles and who killed JFK. I'm not sure how much of this I should believe;
More on Leni Riefenstahl: Her entire estate of films, manuscripts, photographs, letters and other artifacts dating back to the 1920s has been donated to the Prussian Central Heritage Foundation, which manages Berlin’s museums;
Is there only a decade left for print? That’s what Mark Thompson, the CEO of The New York Times Co. thinks, as his entity escalates its digital products and subscriptions;
Have a look around London's Hyman Archive, which houses the largest collection of magazines in the world;
At Britain’s Review 31, a review of Damon Kurkowski’s “The New Analog,” which argues that in the age of digital sound, we’re missing the noise, and the noise is what’s beautiful;
North Carolina novelist Taylor Brown drops this superlative story: “Rednecks: A Short Fiction of the South: 1920 to the Present Day” at Bitter Southerner, which is becoming one of my favorite online cultural publications;
Renowned cricket writer Gideon Haigh turns his attention to American politics for the Australian Book Review, examining Michael Wolff’s new book about the Trump White House;
The story of two bibliophiles hunting down first editions of all kinds of long-out-of-print books, from the Book of Kells to Walter Benjamin;
How to make sure you’ll always have more books than you can ever read. That's never a problem at my homestead.
Happy reading!