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Digby

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Everything posted by Digby

  1. Digby
    $13 for ESPN+ and Hulu seems like a good deal, and maybe there will even be something on Disney+ I want to watch (unlikely though). That said the coordinated tweets from talent are amusing. It will change lives!
  2. Digby
    Some useful further tidbits in this twitter thread from Tannenwald. Overall it's probably mostly a matchup thing. I think a Saturday primetime kickoff would probably be best but MLS needs TV partners who aren't invested in CFB for that to happen.
  3. Digby
    I may be one of the few in the center of that Venn diagram of interests. Don’t let me down SLC!
  4. Digby
    I never trust World Soccer Talk on MLS but this is the only source I can find thus far. 1.27 million viewers for MLS Cup Final on American TV, big drop from last year. I'm tempted to blame having a Canadian market in the final but the same matchup managed 2 million viewers the first time they did it, so maybe it's fatigue. https://worldsoccertalk.com/2019/11/11/seattle-toronto-mls-cup-final-disappoints-1-27-million-viewers/
  5. Digby
    Interesting piece on the Players Tribune, which is apparently hemmoraging money. I assumed it was literally intended to just be a PR firm for athletes, but apparently they were trying to run it like any number of other digital sports news startups? Which, there's your problem. https://digiday.com/media/no-accountability-went-wrong-players-tribune/
  6. Digby
    It's just infuriating. Maybe I could feel better about it if that class of empty-suit ever felt actual shame or consequences, but they don't! Must be nice.
  7. Digby
    Whomever is writing these is trying to keep the voice of snark of Deadspin going and it feels so off in an uncanny-valley sort of way. Or just the standard voice of so many of the crappy faux-blogs that popped up after the halcyon days of sports bloggery.
  8. Digby
    That's not at all unique to Deadspin; from Buzzfeed and HuffPo and even some of the legacy newspapers on down, all kinds of media companies have been pivoting to "people with faces for newspapers perform stupid human tricks" as a cheap way to enter the supposedly higher-margin world of video. Deadspin was one of the few media sources to ruthlessly trash the pivot-to-video movement before/while they were forced into doing it themselves. Of course we now know more than ever that they were right -- there's no demand for this sort of useless content, the execs care more about short-term profits than what their audience would actually like, and Facebook was defrauding its clients with B.S. numbers. This, again, is not Barry Petchesky's fault.
  9. Digby
    I think it's the same as the halcyon days of print newspaper subscriptions: hook them in with a low rate and hope enough people are too lazy or don't notice the eventual hikes to cancel. The more things change, etc. If they run it like a co-op or a nonprofit, maybe it'd work?
  10. Digby
    I hope so, but I think the jury is still out on whether that's a sustainable model, too. Less of a house of cards than video ads that nobody watches, but I think the paywall subscription fee has to be way higher than the Athletic's current charge to sustain an entire operation and pay decently. Seems to me the model in terms of revenue has to be diversified. Either way, the scale play of anodyne clickbait seems to have been pretty well discredited by now, so I'm not sure why any smart exec would want to nuke a site with a loyal, defined audience in favor of another probably-unsustainable SB Nation or For The Win or other Generic Sports Meme Blog. if the site was going to get ruined anyway, I’m glad the staff at least torched the place on the way out.
  11. Digby
    per: https://newrepublic.com/article/155565/deadspin Very cool.
  12. Digby
    I think the Grantland-to-Ringer is a good reference point. Worked out nicely for Zach Lowe and the rest of the NBA shot chart crowd. Otherwise I dunno... the Ringer still doesn't have a fraction of the power or interest Grantland ever had, even with its podcast network.
  13. Digby
    Pulling some class war take on this doesn’t really make any sense considering the instigator of this whole thing is some private equity empty suit trying to go from the 1% to the 0.8%.
  14. Digby
    Rooting for private equity to strip-mine decent sources of entertainment? What a time to be alive.
  15. Digby
    In my personal defense, the success of each Boston team, mostly, inversely proportional to their success during my lifetime. Tom Brady can take a long walk off the Zakim Bridge for all I care.
  16. Digby
    Hold on, I take this back. I forgot about the last day of the 2011 regular season. That was probably the worst of all for me in an “oh my god I can’t believe I am witnessing this calamity before my very eyes.” And it made all my favorite teams happy and it was the culmination of a miserable roster and it led to losing Francona for, May I remind you, Bobby V.
  17. Digby
    Too young to remember Buckner, and fell asleep before the Boone homer, waking up to read the unfortunate score on the Bottom Line at 3:30am. So the Red Sox futility was more of a low-boiling constant source of angst than it was a single horrible day. At least before 2004. I guess my contenders are: 2010 World Cup, USMNT loses to Ghana in the knockout stage. Sure, maybe knockout stage is always good, but this one felt like such a missed opportunity when I was younger and more optimistic about our men's team. An eminently winnable game with what felt like a favorable bracket draw path the next couple rounds. I got too hyped up such that it felt like such a let down in the end! 2017 USMNT vs T&T -- obviously this was much worse from an underachievement perspective. But it was more like the merciful end of a long, terrible time (the late Klinsmann era and too-little-too-late attempted Arena rescue) than the abrupt end to a fun party, so in a way that makes it less of a single bad shock. 2010 NBA Finals Game 7 -- I am very much of the "If Perk didn't get hurt..." church of Celtics fans. And losing to effing Kobe is never something I can deal with. Worse than losing to the Yankees most of the time. I think a common thread in my great big-game disappointments has been my team getting off to an optimistic, maybe lucky start, and then watching with crushing resignation as the inevitable sets in without enough time to fix it (this game, USMNT at the Confed Cup, every single Revolution MLS Cup appearance, the Grady Little incident...)
  18. Digby
    J.E. Skeets & co. have unsurprisingly signed on with the Athletic. "No Dunks" is the new podcast name. I'm a little amazed if the Athletic will be sustainably profitable hoover'ing up all these media personalities for presumably pretty decent salaries. But I hope so!
  19. Digby
    SI still produces many of the best sports stories ... but really suffered under the perfect storm of idiot ownership and too much print focus and a web experience that seemed hostile to letting you read those stories. Not good!
  20. Digby
    I always wished we could claim Ewing for the Boston metro but not for weird creepy racist fantasy reasons. Yowza.
  21. Digby
    All of this and also -- what was fresh 25 years ago probably isn't now. What is useful to the highlight consumer of now? Is it cramming as many catchphrases in as possible?
  22. Digby
    I didn't see anything that got edited; made a dumb joke, then tried to give a genuine response to a genuine question. Didn't intend to start down the mod edit path!
  23. Digby
    mod edit
  24. Digby
    But what's the board's policy on the Iron Front flag
  25. Digby
    Do people still enjoy Emrick’s act? I’m tired of his thesaurus for “pass”, and his yelps and groans are beyond grating.
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