Digby
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Everything posted by Digby
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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/
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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/
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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per: https://newrepublic.com/article/155565/deadspin Very cool.
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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.
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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%.
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Rooting for private equity to strip-mine decent sources of entertainment? What a time to be alive.
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Your worst days of your life as a sports fan v2
Digby replied to TrueYankee26's topic in Sports In General
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. -
Your worst days of your life as a sports fan v2
Digby replied to TrueYankee26's topic in Sports In General
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. -
Your worst days of your life as a sports fan v2
Digby replied to TrueYankee26's topic in Sports In General
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...) -
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!
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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!
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I always wished we could claim Ewing for the Boston metro but not for weird creepy racist fantasy reasons. Yowza.
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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?
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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!
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mod edit
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But what's the board's policy on the Iron Front flag
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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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I think that's mostly accurate -- partially because the writers with more of a brand name are also more annoying, partially because they also give space to a lot of freelancers/excerpt type pieces that are interesting and not picked up elsewhere. Drew Magary has always gotten on my nerves. I don't see the appeal. Maybe it's just that the readership can strongly identify with his reformed-brodude act. He has no real insight into much of anything, but I suppose a lot of people read these just to feel like part of a community. Every now and then he craps out a needlessly aggro column as fresh meat to his aggressively straight audience, I guess to keep that cred. Burneko and Roth aren't as bad because they both clearly know a lot of :censored:, but I can't handle the Arbitrary Capitalized Nouns thing anymore and the general desperation to coin a style in their writing, and in 2019 I hoped that we were done pretending that David Foster Wallace was any fun to read. The new soccer guy they've got is fantastic. Legitimately insightful pieces for the know-nothing-but-trying American soccer audience, treats MLS exactly how it ought to be treated (which is "fine"). I think the deranged MLS-hating guy who didn't know what a bicycle kick was is still, somehow, on the payroll, though -- have always wondered who he blackmailed to keep that position for five years.
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I was thinking a TV show -- Streaming-only doesn't count, I'm old. Well, I've thought Simmons's Boston was too old for me but Nolan's Boston I can relate to (chiefly, horrible Allston dive bars).
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They still haven’t even given Katie Nolan a real job at ESPN, have they?
