Frog DJ
Active Member
My colleagues in the newspaper business say that this is the wave of the future, but how all that will flesh out for smaller publications than the NYT remains to be seen. Very few of them will have a sister platform like The Athletic to lean on.I picked up a subscription a few months ago. I've been generally pleased. The long-form pieces are very good, and you can note your interests so that you get headlines about teams and sports you follow.
The New York Times bought The Athletic in Jan. 2022. I guess NYT is happy with the purchase; earlier this month it disbanded its sports department, putting 35 reporters and editors on the street. Sports was always in an awkward spot for the NYT, which tried to cover global/national stories while also being NYC's local paper. But for subscribers who don't bundle coverage, it has to be frustrating to see lots of links to sports stories in The Athletic that you can't get to.
Many of the best sportswriters are being lured away to websites like MLB.com and the like, so even major market papers in such cities as Philadelphia or San Francisco are scrambling to replace them with younger, qualified people.
One retired scribe predicted that there would be more and more “partnerships” with nearby papers, and that sports departments will become smaller as a result. Here in Houston we already see day old columns from other big city papers, and that will likely be the trend going forward.
Go Frogs!
Last edited: