C Mart Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Connor Hughes (@Connor_J_Hughes) 3/10/18, 8:18 AM Hey there! Some career news: I’m thrilled, excited and (insert additional positive adjectives here) to announce I’m joining @TheAthleticNYC, where I’ll take over covering the #Jets on Monday. For those unfamiliar, The Athletic is a great site for sports coverage, local and national. It’s sort of like the old Frank Deford try at a daily National sports paper. This is obviously web based. If interested check out theathlectic.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxman Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 He is good but that is a tough, tough field. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bugg Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Except nobody wants to pay for content. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
docdhc Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 4 hours ago, Bugg said: Except nobody wants to pay for content. Exactly. They don’t even let you see the front page without signing up for a payment plan. This is destined to fail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jetsbb Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 He is pretending as is he left the Star Ledger to go to this subscription site. I don't see how going from a local newspaper to a startup national subscription news site with probably a tenth of the views is a step up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity28 Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Connor Hughes is a poor man’s Manish Mehta. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HawkeyeJet Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 I don't know much about Connor Hughes or The Athletic's football coverage, but their crew of baseball writers is insanely good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T0mShane Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 Trying to think of an article related to football that I would have paid a nickel to read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gen X Jet Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 Sad Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T0mShane Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 A quick gripe about Jets media coverage, particularly in the papers. Obviously, newspapers are having major issues finding a market in the quote-unquote digital age, and in particular finding funding in the digital age. As a result, any writer who was making over $50k per year fled to ESPN or the NFL Network, or went to work for the franchises themselves. They were replaced at these papers by cheap, young labor who could carve out a social media presence, if not curate sources and write a decent article every so often. What you’re left with is a pack of 26 year-olds sitting on their couches playing Fortnite waiting for their notifications to ping when Ian Rapoport tweets something with the #Jets hashtag, which they could then follow up with “Can confirm that [Rapoport tweet].” And that is the sum total of their reporting repertoire. None of them break stories by themselves. None of them appear to have any sources inside the building. And none of them seem to particularly care about the intended focus of their career: informing the reader. Why does this matter? Because it creates a void that gets filled with Manish Mehta’s clickbait troll carnival. Don’t get me wrong—clickbait trolling has its place, has always existed, and can be illumating and fun, but the problem is that there’s no longer a counterpoint to this trolling because there’s no real journalism going on alongside. Today is the start of free agency in the NFL. Has anyone come across an article, or a tweet, or a single piece of reporting from any of our best writers that would indicate that any of them have ever actually spoken to anyone actually employed by the Jets? To whit: here is Costello’s latest. It’s got a good headline, “The Problem With the Jets Having The NFL’s Most Free Agency Money.” That’s a story I’d like to read, right? However, it’s worthless and reads like a lame post on a message board that’d get two “likes” and mercifully get scrolled off the front page within an hour. This is not informative and it doesn’t attempt to answer the question presented in the title. It’s a 400-word blog post that looks like it was written while sitting on the toilet. There is no original reporting, it contains a banal quote from Maccagnan that was cut and pasted from a previous source, and the conclusion it asserts is “yeah, the Jets need players and should get some.” The question is, is Hughes going to be doing anything at The Athletic that’s any different, that serves the Jets fan better than the current hackery, and is worth paying for? Hughes seems like a good dude and he started out trying to do some interesting and ambitious things, but it seemed like he fell into the Costello/Slater/Kim Martin trap where their attempts at reporting got lazy and consisted of an extended complaint about how long and lame training camp was and how lame the Jets beat is, as if they were eternally damned to cover the opening of a Chipotle in Forest Hills. Quote The Jets finally are No. 1 … in salary-cap space. With the moves the Browns made Friday, acquiring Jarvis Landry and Tyrod Taylor, the Jets moved past Cleveland to the top of the heap in salary-cap space. They have $89.9 million in space, according to overthecap.com, as free agency begins Monday with teams being permitted to talk to agents. Players cannot officially sign deals until Wednesday at 4 p.m. The Jets have the money to spend. The question now is whether they can find enough players worth spending it on. That is the problem with NFL free agency — the players who usually become free agents do so for a reason. They have a flaw that makes them expendable to their current team, whether that be age, salary demand or production. It is what scares some teams off from spending big in free agency. The Jets know they will end up overpaying players in free agency, but they can do that because of the war chest they currently have. The benefit of drafting so poorly from 2008-14 is having very few young players who need to be paid. Leonard Williams figures to be the next one, and he is not scheduled to hit free agency until 2020 if the Jets exercise his fifth-year option. The Jets have targets in mind, and they hope to find players who can stick with their team for several years. That starts with quarterback Kirk Cousins, whose agent will surely get a call from the Jets on Monday to set up a visit with the top free agent. After Cousins, GM Mike Maccagnan will be looking for younger free agents who can be part of the core of the Jets. “I think our approach will be, obviously, to try to figure out every position and make it as competitive as possible,” Maccagnan said at the Scouting Combine, “and to a certain degree I think we’re going to try to do things that will help us not only in this coming season but obviously identify players that can help us next year and the year after that, so we continue to build a young group of players. We made a lot of very tough decisions last year sort of retooling the roster with the idea that after we got through last year we’d get to this season when we have a lot of cap space and cash to potentially work with. That’s what we’re excited about.” The Jets’ roster has plenty of holes to fill. On offense (besides quarterback), expect the Jets to be aggressive at running back, center and possibly wide receiver. On defense, they need to add another cornerback and possibly a pass rusher. They also are trying to re-sign several of their own free agents, including Demario Davis, Morris Claiborne and Austin Seferian-Jenkins. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jetscrazey Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 We're past the point where people pay for subscriptions to sports content, me thinks this will fail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxman Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 14 hours ago, docdhc said: Exactly. They don’t even let you see the front page without signing up for a payment plan. This is destined to fail. Oh wow. Yes that is not a business model that will work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxman Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 14 hours ago, Jetsbb said: He is pretending as is he left the Star Ledger to go to this subscription site. I don't see how going from a local newspaper to a startup national subscription news site with probably a tenth of the views is a step up. They might be paying him more. Or the potential to make more. No offense to these guys, I have a lot of respect for most of them, but the salaries in this field have to be brutal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peebag Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 1 minute ago, Maxman said: Oh wow. Yes that is not a business model that will work. I dunno, that Scout group really made a killing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxman Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 1 minute ago, peebag said: I dunno, that Scout group really made a killing. Yes, true. They killed their investors hopes and dreams lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jetmech Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 The Athletic for NY coverage is just in the beginning stages unlike their beginning's.Thing is it seems they are now focusing on the local subscriber and not the out of market one.Too early to tell, I believe Arthur Staple went there as well..Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jetmech Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 The Athletic for NY coverage is just in the beginning stages unlike their beginning's.Thing is it seems they are now focusing on the local subscriber and not the out of market one.Too early to tell, I believe Arthur Staple went there as well..Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C Mart Posted March 12, 2018 Author Share Posted March 12, 2018 7 hours ago, Maxman said: They might be paying him more. Or the potential to make more. No offense to these guys, I have a lot of respect for most of them, but the salaries in this field have to be brutal. The Athletic Raises $20 Million to Fund Expansion The Athletic, a subscription-based sports media startup, is preparing to more than double its staffing and expand to new professional sports markets after securing a new investment round. Two years after launching as “the new sports page,” the Athletic has raised $20 million, according to Athletic co-founder and Chief Executive Alex Mather. The funding round, the company’s third, was led by Evolution Media, the growth-stage investment company founded by TPG Growth and Creative Artists Agency. Before this round, the Athletic raised $10 million in two rounds led by Courtside Ventures. Mr. Mather and his co-founder, Adam Hansmann, have positioned the Athletic as a reader-supported, advertising-free alternative to traditional sports coverage, at a time when nationally recognized outlets like ESPN and Sports Illustrated have cut positions and had to rethink their approach to sports news. The Athletic plans to use most of the financing to continue its expansion across the U.S., establishing a presence in every market with a professional sports team by the end of the year. By the end of 2018, the Athletic plans to have between 200 and 350 employees, up from its current staff of 120. The company currently has a foothold in 23 markets across the U.S. and Canada, and plans to expand to roughly 45 markets by the end of the year. In the works are city sites for Boston and Los Angeles and coverage of soccer in the U.S., Mexico and the U.K., Mr. Mather said. The company is also planning to establish teams dedicated to coverage of NFL and the NBA nationally. The Athletic is among a group of digital media startups that has turned to subscriptions as a primary source of revenue at a time of profound disruption for the advertising industry. As Google and Facebook consume an ever-larger share of the digital advertising market, publishers such as the Athletic, tech news site the Information and the life sciences publication Stat are all betting that reader revenue is key to survival. “What we’ve learned over the last couple of years is there’s an appetite for high-quality coverage, whether it’s local or national,” Mr. Mather said. Mr. Mather said that the company’s subscribers have reached six figures, declining to be more specific. While the company isn’t yet profitable, Mr. Mather said that some of the company’s earliest markets—places like Chicago—have more than 25,000 subscribers and are profitable. The Athletic offers subscriptions for $8 a month or $48 a year. The Athletic doesn’t have any advertising, but Mr. Mather said the company plans to begin testing sponsorship for events and podcasts in the coming months. He said the company is also considering syndication deals with local TV stations, but no such deals are in place yet. News outlets that bank on subscription revenue are insulated from swings in the advertising market. But they face other challenges, such as the cost of retaining and acquiring readers and keeping subscribers interested after initial enthusiasm wanes in a new market. The Athletic says that roughly 90% of its subscribers renew annually, according to a company spokesperson, who added that the company is currently growing its oldest markets at a rate of about 20% month-over-month. As many sports media outlets faced cutbacks in recent years, the Athletic is luring writers by offering a stake in the company and a break from the constant churn of blog posts that have come to define sports writing on the internet. The company is offering some writers premiums on salaries they earned at previous jobs and guaranteed contracts, according to a person familiar with the matter. “Being a subscription site, it’s back to basics,” said Paul Fichtenbaum, chief content officer at the Athletic. “It’s back to storytelling.” Other participating firms in the new funding round included Courtside Ventures, Luminari Capital, Advancit Capital, Bertelsmann Digital Media, the Chernin Group, LionTree Partners, Amasia, Y Combinator, Precursor Ventures, Chris Silbermann and Ali Rowghani. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-athletic-raises-20-million-to-fund-expansion-1520269215 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jet9 Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 8 hours ago, T0mShane said: A quick gripe about Jets media coverage, particularly in the papers. Obviously, newspapers are having major issues finding a market in the quote-unquote digital age, and in particular finding funding in the digital age. As a result, any writer who was making over $50k per year fled to ESPN or the NFL Network, or went to work for the franchises themselves. They were replaced at these papers by cheap, young labor who could carve out a social media presence, if not curate sources and write a decent article every so often. What you’re left with is a pack of 26 year-olds sitting on their couches playing Fortnite waiting for their notifications to ping when Ian Rapoport tweets something with the #Jets hashtag, which they could then follow up with “Can confirm that [Rapoport tweet].” And that is the sum total of their reporting repertoire. None of them break stories by themselves. None of them appear to have any sources inside the building. And none of them seem to particularly care about the intended focus of their career: informing the reader. Why does this matter? Because it creates a void that gets filled with Manish Mehta’s clickbait troll carnival. Don’t get me wrong—clickbait trolling has its place, has always existed, and can be illumating and fun, but the problem is that there’s no longer a counterpoint to this trolling because there’s no real journalism going on alongside. Today is the start of free agency in the NFL. Has anyone come across an article, or a tweet, or a single piece of reporting from any of our best writers that would indicate that any of them have ever actually spoken to anyone actually employed by the Jets? To whit: here is Costello’s latest. It’s got a good headline, “The Problem With the Jets Having The NFL’s Most Free Agency Money.” That’s a story I’d like to read, right? However, it’s worthless and reads like a lame post on a message board that’d get two “likes” and mercifully get scrolled off the front page within an hour. This is not informative and it doesn’t attempt to answer the question presented in the title. It’s a 400-word blog post that looks like it was written while sitting on the toilet. There is no original reporting, it contains a banal quote from Maccagnan that was cut and pasted from a previous source, and the conclusion it asserts is “yeah, the Jets need players and should get some.” The question is, is Hughes going to be doing anything at The Athletic that’s any different, that serves the Jets fan better than the current hackery, and is worth paying for? Hughes seems like a good dude and he started out trying to do some interesting and ambitious things, but it seemed like he fell into the Costello/Slater/Kim Martin trap where their attempts at reporting got lazy and consisted of an extended complaint about how long and lame training camp was and how lame the Jets beat is, as if they were eternally damned to cover the opening of a Chipotle in Forest Hills. Yup. As a NYR fan, Larry Brooks of the NYP used to break stuff all the time. He hasnt had a decent rumor in forever now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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