OT: The Athletic

[Smartguy]

Agreed with everyone else, the oilers content is pretty trash, you or I could right just as insightful stuff. But for the NHL overall I really like it

 

[guymez]

This is a false equivalence. And I'm a huge supporter of open source software and free sharing of information on the Internet, who thinks anti piracy laws are misguided at best.

Libraries paid for books, and required effort to access. It's an economy of scale issue. Libraries can and could only exist because enough other people paid for the convenience/luxury of permanently owning the books and/or having the news delivered to your home.

On the Internet, everyone has access to information from anywhere they have a phone, so suddenly said economies of scale don't work. It's not a majority of the buying public essentially subsidizing libraries, it's the majority of the public no longer paying for news. Which leads to advertising being the only source of revenue, specifically ****ty web ads dependent on clicks. Thus click bait becomes the only sustainable way for these sites to continue to pay their staff.

I'm not certain I'd use the Athletic enough to want to pay for it, but I strongly support paying direct subscriptions for well written news. It's the only viable way I see that good news survives, other than state subsidies.

Honestly I think I might have just convinced myself to give the Athletic a go by writing this out, lol.

If it was possible to 'like' something more than 1 time this post would definitely qualify.

 

[A91]

Paid like 50$ for the year after my free trial ended. Its part of my daily routine now along with Hf and a few soccer sites.
I quite enjoy it, not sure I will subscribe after its finished though as money has become tighter now.

 

[StevenF1919]

Paid like 50$ for the year after my free trial ended. Its part of my daily routine now along with Hf and a few soccer sites.
I quite enjoy it, not sure I will subscribe after its finished though as money has become tighter now.

Their soccer content has been surprisingly good.

 

[AM]

This is a false equivalence. And I'm a huge supporter of open source software and free sharing of information on the Internet, who thinks anti piracy laws are misguided at best.

Libraries paid for books, and required effort to access. It's an economy of scale issue. Libraries can and could only exist because enough other people paid for the convenience/luxury of permanently owning the books and/or having the news delivered to your home.

On the Internet, everyone has access to information from anywhere they have a phone, so suddenly said economies of scale don't work. It's not a majority of the buying public essentially subsidizing libraries, it's the majority of the public no longer paying for news. Which leads to advertising being the only source of revenue, specifically ****ty web ads dependent on clicks. Thus click bait becomes the only sustainable way for these sites to continue to pay their staff.

I'm not certain I'd use the Athletic enough to want to pay for it, but I strongly support paying direct subscriptions for well written news. It's the only viable way I see that good news survives, other than state subsidies.

Honestly I think I might have just convinced myself to give the Athletic a go by writing this out, lol.

You get what you pay for.

 

[Drivesaitl]

You get what you pay for.

Which explains why Land Rovers and Jaguars are about the worst things anybody could throw their money away at.

Not connected but not sure that the supposed conventional wisdom quoted is really all that true.

Rather people pay for what they want to pay for. Sometimes that involves quality, from what I'm hearing the Athletic is one of those instances.

 

[AM]

Which explains why Land Rovers and Jaguars are about the worst things anybody could throw their money away at.

Not connected but not sure that the supposed conventional wisdom quoted is really all that true.

Rather people pay for what they want to pay for. Sometimes that involves quality, from what I'm hearing the Athletic is one of those instances.

Well its a sign of the times, everything is over priced.

Even free opinions on the internet.

 

[Drivesaitl]

Well its a sign of the times, everything is over priced.

Even free opinions on the internet.

I'll let you have the last word, even if its an opinion, I promise.

The great news is the season is starting soon and less random threads.

enjoy the Athletic people!

 

[joestevens29]

Anyone comment on their NFL part? Do they have an APP?

 

[StevenF1919]

Anyone comment on their NFL part? Do they have an APP?

They've got writers for every NFL team and a bunch of college football teams. They've got iPhone and Android apps. Everything is ad free.

 

[RegDunlop]

Not really. The sign of the times is the internet, correct, but its what has destroyed true journalism, and twitter and social media have destroyed true writing. We're removing both the audience and source for critical writing, and then wonder why critical writing is not commonly seen in present times. Its a race to the bottom for literature. With the day being owned by Novellas written to twitterverse audiences. Not exactly classics. The times don't demand classics, they demand filler. Even graphic novellas will do, apparently.

Great literature of the millennium would be a course with a limited but insufferable reading list.

This is a good post.
But change is inevitable. Some for the better but not all. Our generation looks at the internet and social media as detrimental to our historic traits.
I don't think the current generation feels the same.

 

[RegDunlop]

One thing I've heard lately about 'The Athletic' is that I believe they have a new local writer for Edmonton.
My aplogies if I'm incorrect.

 

[mervincm]

I subscribe. Somehow I paid 73$ for the year, not 50$ ...
Its only been a few weeks so far but I am happy. The biggest issue is their app is a massive battery killer on IOS ...... It is defective bad ...

 

[Burnt Biscuits]

Agreed with everyone else, the oilers content is pretty trash, you or I could right just as insightful stuff. But for the NHL overall I really like it

Lowetide was a long time mod here and was certainly one of the best posters on the board at the time, I haven't read his Athletic content, but I can't imagine him not turning out better content than the vast majority of posters on here would if afforded the same opportunity.

 

[rambo97]

The Athletic is awesome especially if you are into the other sports. There NFL content is the best (especially for NFL fantasy....the analytics they use to recommend pickups is amazing and can help win your league). Their MLB content is good as well.

The Oilers content is ok. A few days ago they had an article about the Oilers prospects and the starts they’ve had which was pretty decent.

I personally think the Oilers content on any site sucks. I’ve never really “learned” anything new from HF, Oilersnation, Cult of Hockey, The Athletic, etc. Is a fun read sometimes so for entertainment I’d recommend.

The Athletic does have good articles on the NHL and they have reporters from all the NHL teams so if you like NHL content then you probably can’t go wrong.

If you are just looking at the Oilers and no other teams and no other leagues then probably not worth it. You can get all the info on the Oilers for free from a few free sites

 

[Drivesaitl]

Lowetide was a long time mod here and was certainly one of the best posters on the board at the time, I haven't read his Athletic content, but I can't imagine him not turning out better content than the vast majority of posters on here would if afforded the same opportunity.

Ice Dragoon was easily a better poster, and always, than Lowetide. Lowetide had his shtick, kind of a weird ramble using out of sync comparisons, analogies and like myself took a meandering road to get to a point. But he heavily uses a kind of script and formula. A decade ago here there were a lot of good writers.

Not sure what happened to Ice Dragoon. She just disappeared kind of suddenly.

There used to be, on the old side a sticky of the alltime best threads and OP's. That was some good reading as well. Its unfortunate all that is lost somewhere in a wayback machine. I might dig sometime.

 

[Spirit of 67]

Not sure what the media is like for the Oilers but the TO media is pretty brutal and loves shitting on the team.
The Athletic seems to be more positive leaning. YMMV

I have no idea if I will re-up when the time comes. The writing is generally excellent with well researched, in depth articles. This poses a bit of a problem for me as I don't much like reading and their articles are long. I seldom finish reading the ones I do read.

 

[joestevens29]

The Athletic is awesome especially if you are into the other sports. There NFL content is the best (especially for NFL fantasy....the analytics they use to recommend pickups is amazing and can help win your league). Their MLB content is good as well.

The Oilers content is ok. A few days ago they had an article about the Oilers prospects and the starts they’ve had which was pretty decent.

I personally think the Oilers content on any site sucks. I’ve never really “learned” anything new from HF, Oilersnation, Cult of Hockey, The Athletic, etc. Is a fun read sometimes so for entertainment I’d recommend.

The Athletic does have good articles on the NHL and they have reporters from all the NHL teams so if you like NHL content then you probably can’t go wrong.

If you are just looking at the Oilers and no other teams and no other leagues then probably not worth it. You can get all the info on the Oilers for free from a few free sites

Interesting. I will check it out next week for the free trial.

I do disagree on not learning anything new. This site and Oilersnation have lots of interesting tidbits from time to time. Especially when Gregor or Nielsen have articles and they talk about what they see/hear at practice.

 

[dhawken]

I've subscribed since they added the Oilers coverage over a year ago. The intro price was decent for the content, the renewal price is higher and I'm contemplating not renewing. The oilers stuff is good IMO - better than lots out there, but I'm not sure its indispensable. I liked the Edmonton writers before they went to the Athletic, so it wasn't that hard of a decision. For the current price though, I'm not sure I need to spend that money on their content.

The "cup of coffee a month" line is just marketing - i'm at $60/year USD now. For just Oiler coverage, that's too much for me. I don't ready any of their other sports coverage, and very little of their other NHL coverage. Might start checking that out more as I get nearer to my renewal deadline. Most of the non-oiler articles I've read over the last year+ have been so-so IMO - probably due to my interest in their subjects rather than quality.

 

[CycloneSweep]

The reason people are paying for things online now opposed to free is before content creators could get by alone on pretty unobtrusive ads and the like. The more content creators that have existed means less and less per ad so they had to adapt. On YouTube you get less and less per view, per ad per watch. They can't get by anymore.

Some have gone to completely selling out where they plug in some advertiser every couple minutes, or have like 3 ads in a 10 minutes video or website content having the really annoying ads within the content or auto playing video ads. All this has led to ad blockers bring very popular which has caused less and less revenue for the creators which leads to more annoying ads.

Other creators have said screw this and moved to subscription funding models like the Athletic. Others have went to things like Patreon as well. This way people can support the content they want and not have to navigate thru ad riddled messes.

The free internet is going away as media companies and advertiser's are finding ways to squeeze every penny out of it which causes writers, content creators and the masses to suffer.

 

[Drivesaitl]

The reason people are paying for things online now opposed to free is before content creators could get by alone on pretty unobtrusive ads and the like. The more content creators that have existed means less and less per ad so they had to adapt. On YouTube you get less and less per view, per ad per watch. They can't get by anymore.

Some have gone to completely selling out where they plug in some advertiser every couple minutes, or have like 3 ads in a 10 minutes video or website content having the really annoying ads within the content or auto playing video ads. All this has led to ad blockers bring very popular which has caused less and less revenue for the creators which leads to more annoying ads.

Other creators have said screw this and moved to subscription funding models like the Athletic. Others have went to things like Patreon as well. This way people can support the content they want and not have to navigate thru ad riddled messes.

The free internet is going away as media companies and advertiser's are finding ways to squeeze every penny out of it which causes writers, content creators and the masses to suffer.

I think this is over selling it. Even main papers like NY times, get only about 20% from online subcriptions. most revenues are adds. The reality is that even in print times the subscription or single paper purchase price was always a token fee, subsidized heavily by the advertising.

Internet sites sayng they can't make a go on that jus don't have a large enough audience and or don't put out a news product that people think they require. I have a hard time imagining that entities like the Atlantic will sustain this and do better than just using advertising. its the advertising that has always been paying most of the bills ever since there were newspapers.

I've been hearing about free internet dying since it was first online. We'll see.

Also deserves to be said that the major players, Google, YouTube, Social media platforms etc all want content immediately available even as they do song and dance around copyrights. Those big boys aren't going away. They rule.

 

[CycloneSweep]

I think this is over selling it. Even main papers like NY times, get only about 20% from online subcriptions. most revenues are adds. The reality is that even in print times the subscription or single paper purchase price was always a token fee, subsidized heavily by the advertising.

Internet sites sayng they can't make a go on that jus don't have a large enough audience and or don't put out a news product that people think they require. I have a hard time imagining that entities like the Atlantic will sustain this and do better than just using advertising. its the advertising that has always been paying most of the bills ever since there were newspapers.

I've been hearing about free internet dying since it was first online. We'll see.

Also deserves to be said that the major players, Google, YouTube, Social media platforms etc all want content immediately available even as they do song and dance around copyrights. Those big boys aren't going away. They rule.

YouTube has been having a very rough go lately because the people who create the content on YouTube make far less then they used to so they have to ad more and more advertising into the content to keep it up.

 

[Bangers]

I agree with this.
The Internet in some respects has created a sense of entitlement just because access is so easy and convenient.

The flipside of this? If a site is charging me for access, they'd damned well better not be showing ads or tracking/selling my data (dont know if the Athletic does this, but I get p***ed off when sites do this).

 

[Jumptheshark]

It really shows how lacking sports journalists are in Edmonton if Lowetide and Willis are the best guys The Athletic could find.

Combination of money offered and other outlets not allowing their guys to moonlight

 

[Jumptheshark]

YouTube has been having a very rough go lately because the people who create the content on YouTube make far less then they used to so they have to ad more and more advertising into the content to keep it up.

They are making less money in part due to how YouTube has changed their rules and have gone to the dark side with demonitising many videos now.