The platonic ideal of sports journalism
Revisiting research on The Athletic understand this week's news
Four years ago, my friend, former podcaster and frequent co-author Galen Clavio and I published a study on The Athletic.
The piece (formal link here, free version is here), which Communication and Sport published, looked at The Athletic through those “Why I Joined The Athletic” columns that felt ubiquitous back when the site was growing on a weekly basis.
In the light of this past week’s news about The Athletic, the 20 layoffs and the restructuring of the site’s editorial priorities, it’s worth revisiting that paper and those letters. To understand why this week’s news was such a shock to the sports journalism ecosystem, it’s important to remember The Athletic of 2017-2018, the promise and possibility it offered.
In our study, Galen and I analyzed 88 introductory columns from The Athletic. We were looking for common themes, trying to figure out what these columns could tell us about how The Athletic and its writers viewed sports journalism as a whole. The essential question was, what could we learn about the state of sports journalism from them?
We found three central themes:
Writers giving their own journalistic biography.
Selling the superiority of The Athletic’s editorial model.
Communicating to readers what they should expect and deserve.
That second one is the key for the larger question. Remember that back in 2017-2018, The Athletic’s model was new and interesting. There was no paywall, no number of free articles that some could read before being forced to subscribe. You had to pay to read from the start. Also, there were no ads on the site. The idea was that readers would pay for the type of coverage they wanted and deserved from talented, passionate reporters who got them. No clickbait. No liisticles. No pivots to video. Just good honest solid sports writing.
From our paper (which, to be honest, might be the best piece of academic writing I’ve ever done:
Rather than being forward-looking, many of the pieces here offer a back-to-the- future promise to readers. To some degree, the core message of this theme is that the newspaper industry failed in its efforts to transition online but The Athletic is now here to fix it … the introductory columns frame The Athletic as the home of proper sports journalism.
From my perspective, this was the biggest thing we found:
Within those claims by the writers is a collective definition of idealized sports journalism from the perspective of the writers. The Athletic is portrayed by most of the writers as a platonic ideal of sports journalism, a place free from deadline pressure, clickbait stories, invasive advertisements, editors that want the writer to take the extra time to write the important story, and a focus on writing to the most passionate of sports fans rather than the casual consumer. In other words, the envi- ronment at The Athletic mirrors the type of sports writing that most aspiring writers fantasize about in their college newspaper’s newsroom.
That’s why this week’s news was such a shock to the sports journalism ecosystem. It’s not the 20 layoffs. That news was objectively bad, as it is anytime any journalist (or human, for that matter) loses their job through no fault of their own. But let’s be honest - that’s a typical week for some newspaper chains.
No, it was the announcement that The Athletic was shifting its priorities from individual beats to more national news that is more shocking. Because it’s an abdication of the site’s original mission. It takes all the promises made in those letters (which, yes, were just well-written house ads for the site) and renders them obsolete.
In his excellent Substack, Michael Weinrab connected The Athletic story with the demise of The National in the early 1990s. It’s an apt comparison. The more things change, nothing ever ends, etc.
For years, The Athletic felt like an interesting site for researchers studying the ecosystem, the state, and the future of digital sports journalism and digital journalism itself. But after the sale to The Times and now the news this week, that feels like it has changed. It feels less revolutionary, less interesting, less like the platonic ideal of a sports newsroom and more like any other sports news outlet.
Social construction of newsrooms
Monday was a busy day for news in my area of research.
Along with all of The Athletic stuff, the great David Remnick published an interview with A.G. Sulzburger, the New York Times’ publisher in The New Yorker. From the interview:
We saw an inversion of how reporters’ day was spent. The new model is you have to write three to five stories a day. And, if you have to write three to five stories a day, there is no time to get out into the world.
When you hear sociologists like me say that news is a social construct, this is what we’re getting at.
Notice the passive way Sulzburger describes this era of journalism. “We saw an inversion …”
The state of the journalism industry is not a thing that mythically appeared. The world Sulzburger describes here didn’t just happen. It’s something that was deliberately created by the calculated decisions of publishers and editors.
It’s a reality that was constructed.
This isn’t a value judgment on it (or any kind of social construct). But let’s acknowledge it for what it is. It’s not a state that just happened thanks to the guidance of an invisible hand. It’s a social construct, something that was human made for reasons and to align with incentives.