The Press Box - What It’s Like to Work at The Athletic With Lindsay Jones. Plus, ESPN and Newsroom AI.

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Bryan and David are joined by colleague Lindsay Jones to discuss her experience working at The Athletic. They review Bob Kravitz’s piece on Substack, touch on Jones’s experience at the site, and discuss how things are progressing after the merger with the Times (4:33). Later, they debate just how well our new member of the newsroom, Genesis, an artificial intelligence tool, could integrate into the workplace (40:05). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Lindsay Jones Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Issa Kwanga and I'm Ryan Hunt. And we co-host Stadio, a football podcast, on the Ring of Podcast Network. If you like soccer or football, make sure you search for Stadio, a football podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes. We got some news from ESPN. Oh. Some more news from ESPN. Bob Eiger said that Disney is looking for a strategic partner for ESPN.

Now, if you're like me and don't speak business, strategic partner apparently means someone who will pay us for a chunk of ESPN which is shedding cable subscribers and CNBC's Alex Sherman reports that ESPN had preliminary talks with the NFL, the NBA and MLB about being minority investors in ESPN.

So this is interesting, right? We're not talking about necessarily another media company coming in and being an investor in ESPN, which that certainly could happen, but the league's ESPN covers could come in and be a minority investor. How do you think that would work with ESPN's journalism? In a weird way, it would solve the sort of ethical quandary of how you can cover these sports when you're contractually so in bed with them, right?

Now it's just like, no, they're the, they're the, they're the, they're the, they're the owners here. We don't just give them billions of dollars to show their games. They actually formally own us now. How you'd navigate that relationship if one of these leagues was actually an investor in ESPN. Again, I just like, I don't underestimate the journalists there, but I just think that might be beyond, that might not be a phone call for management that you can just wave away so easily. It also just makes me think of what a miracle ESPN's journalistic infrastructure was to begin with. I don't mean to put it in the past tense because, again, a lot of it's still there, but it's been diminished a lot too over the last few years.

Again, they have less money to spend on it. There is perhaps less interest inside the building in pushing journalism. But I'm just like, it's amazing that happened. That didn't have to happen at ESPN. It happened because of a few key people like John Walsh. It happened because they had lots of money to spend on stuff, including on people like us. But it is, if we can look back at that 25-year run,

it's amazing how much journalism they did. Yeah. Could have turned out really differently. Entertaining, interesting, but without that journalistic core at its center. and I just wonder again if you had that Lee as a buy-in partner

how would you do that what way could you do that I mean it's like it's like the post and Jeff Bezos but it's more complicated because it's not like the post just covers Amazon no it's ridiculous and it's totally not it's totally dysfunctional the only argument for

it is weirdly another post rationalization of you know letting everybody go to hire to employ the Stephen A. Smith's of the world that this is not a knock on Stephen A. Smith, but if you're only hiring big guns, then maybe they're slightly more bulletproof and more ability and more able to go express themselves without the fear of, you know, reprisal from the corporate partners. But even that's ridiculous, you know, that would never happen. Because we know the NBA never complained about Jeff Van Gundy recently let go by ESPN, right?

Maybe they're already a partner. Maybe that's what's going on. We should completely take that off the table. But the NBA would ever complain about the guy who was going after the refs during high-profile NBA games. That never, never must have happened. Coming up on today's pod, David, you might have read something about what it's like to work at the athletic. A ringer colleague, Lindsay Jones, worked there. What was her experience?

Plus, news organizations look to hire a hot new reporter, AI, and how many high culture references can you count in those stories about Barbie? All that and much more on the press box. A part of the Ringer, podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Erica Servantes here. Our guest today, David, is one of our favorite colleagues. Lindsay Jones is a senior editor here at The Ringer. Before joining us, she worked at newspapers like the Denver Post and USA Today.

And relevant to our purposes here, she was also a writer for four years at the Athletic. She's here to talk about what it was like to work for the publication that just took over sports coverage at the New York Times. Lindsay, welcome to the press box. Hi, guys, long time listener. I'm so excited to be on the show. Finally, this is, yeah, it's lovely to join you guys. Every time I get a direct message on Slack

after one of our episodes publishes, I click on it with a little bit of trepidation. But Lindsay was kind enough to say that we were right about a couple of things last time we talked about it. And that, you know, obviously she has a point of view. And I was just like, please come on and tell us. So we're not just like screaming into the void.

Sure. So let's start here. Bob Kravitz, a writer who was laid off by the Athletic in June, wrote a piece on Substack portraying the site as obsessed with writers delivering new subscribers, as shifting between local and national coverage. I want to get into those two points separately later on. But first, what did you think of Kravitz's story? Yeah, I mean, I think in many respects he was like right on about kind of a lot of things about

what it was like working at the athletic over the last. couple of years where, you know, there were a lot of pivots, a lot of, you know, changing and priorities, but also, you know, it was a place where we're able to do, like, really incredible work. And for a long time, there was a ton of kind of creative freedom. And, you know, and I know Bob, especially kind of, he was a columnist role in Indianapolis, where he could kind of write about everything there that was related to, like, Indianapolis sports. But, you know, I just think that it, you know, it hit a nerve, I think, with a lot of current and former athletic employees of like, yeah, that was kind of really, you know, what it was like. If you've read it,

I mean, he talked a lot about the metrics that I know we're going to get into. He talked a lot about kind of the pressures to hit all of those different metrics. And then he also just talked about, you know, just, I think just really the stress of kind of like working in that environment going through so many changes. And, you know, I know I got a lot of text about it when it landed from current and former colleagues. And, you know, it was just really interesting because, I mean, there's so much discussion about, like, what's going on with, you know,

all the drama, the palace intrigue. And as it involves these, you know, these sites in the newspaper, the Times and everything. And, you know, it just pulled back the curtain a little bit about kind of the day to day. Let me play devil's advocate. Well, this is a very low-key devil's advocate. This is like, you know, one of the devil's minions advocates, I guess.

But, I mean, Kravitz has been around for a long time. And guys like him have a pretty, I mean, might have a pretty kind of cloistered existence at a newspaper when they worked there. So when I read the piece, I guess I was shocked at how sort of spot on some of the metrics chasing aspects of it went. But it also sort of occurred to me that maybe that was something he was just totally sheltered from on the newspaper side and that it might not be a sort of breathtaking to someone from your generation. Did it feel like it was that over the top from where you? you were sitting too? Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. I thought, you know, he did have a line in there.

He was like, you know, I never should have left to the Indianapolis Star, that that was like, you know, in hindsight, that was like the move. It wasn't going to the athletic. It was like having left newspapers in the first place. And actually, he went to a TV station in Indianapolis between the star and going to the Athletic. And yeah, and he wasn't a very different kind of role there. That was always a weird spot at the Athletic where he was a columnist and kind of like a local columnist. And it's a job that didn't exist in most places within the athletic ecosystem.

There's a couple. Who else? Marcus Thompson, Jeff Schultz, and Atlanta, kind of as a columnist specific to a market. But even in, like, New York, there wasn't, like, a columnist. There wasn't, there weren't really, like, national columnist either. Like, I felt I kind of ended up filling, like, a football columnist role for several years when I was, like, a football columnist role. For several years, when I was on our national NFL desk there. Jim Trotter is kind of doing that now, which I'm so glad that he landed there. I think it's a really, really excellent spot for him,

and he's going to have a lot of, he's going to have a large platform there to write the type of stories that he wants to tell. But yeah, I think, like, you know, Bob kind of came from a different place where, like, yeah, I mean, he's a little bit older than I am. He worked in newspapers for a very, very long time, you know, had kind of been through, like, the glory days

where, you know, newspapers had had a little bit of, lot of money and we're spending a ton of money to travel and had huge staffs and then a lot of downsizing and yeah where our colleagues that are 28 to 30 years old have not been through some of those things that the rest of us old grizzled media veterans I think have have lived through so I just think it you know it was important as he said David to kind of like remember his perspective on it but I think like inherently that the points that he was making um especially about the things we're going to talk about with metrics and the local national balance were really, really important.

Let's go there next, Lindsay. How did the athletic subscriber goals for writers, which are also known as conversions at other publications work? Yeah, and it changed a lot over the years that I was there. And I think, you know, so I joined in 2018, so a couple years after launch. And I know it was different kind of the first couple of years where the people who, you know, especially like college football writers, hockey writers, who kind of joined initially when the athletic very, you know, very first launched.

what subscriber goals were like, if there were bonuses, if you hit certain targets. You know, I know for me in particular, and kind of everybody who was in my generation of working at the athletic, like everybody had a sub goal. And it was just part of your job. And it was like an annual goal. And it was part of your performance review, basically. Like, are you driving enough subs? And if you weren't driving enough subs, that was a red flag.

And it's something that would come up in your meetings with your managers. and, you know, there was, I never felt like I had a ton of transparency of, like, where that number was coming from. Like, I think it was kind of like, you're a national writer and then this, you know, this X is your, is your subgoal. It did change, like, you know, because I think we expressed a lot often, often as employees who worked there about how stressful the subgoals are. because it can be really like arbitrary, which stories would drive subs and times a year. Like if you manage to like drop a couple big,

you know, or interesting stories during the Black Friday sale where it was a dollar a year or a dollar a month or whatever the sales were, like you could all of a sudden pick up like 500 subs in a weekend. And that just would like, that would be huge. But then sometimes you would spend, and Bob alluded to this in his subject. tech piece too. Sometimes you would spend two months like intensely reporting and writing,

you know, a feature and you'd get like five subs. And you're like, you know, it is totally arbitrary by like what gets picked up. If, you know, for our case, like sometimes something would get aggregated, a bunch of would get picked up by pro football talk and shared around or Adam Schaefter would retweet a story or something. And then all of a sudden you get a lot of subs. And if those things don't happen, then it didn't, it didn't drive subs. So that was always really stressful to me of the like kind of the arbitrary nature of what would bring in subs and what didn't. And they did move away from that like later in my time there in terms of like how, you know, how important those sub goals were just because, you know, once you do it, once you,

once you like hit a million subscribers, like where the new, you know, new subscribers coming from. So, you know, sometimes metrics would shift then where it was more about subscriber retention and engagement and, you know, all the million pieces of data that you can follow. But, but subs are, you know, were and I believe still are a pretty big part of the business model there. Did you find yourself writing different kinds of stories in order to hit your subscriber numbers? Yes and no. I mean, I think like I was always kind of driven to follow the pieces that I wanted to write the most. And especially for my last couple years there, like it was also hard. because it was the pandemic era

and, you know, it was the Deshawn Watson era too where like I felt like I had to write a lot of the really serious stuff. I was writing a lot of like COVID-related stories and those weren't always like big sub-drivers necessarily, but it was stuff that we just had to cover and I knew I would write it in a way that other people wouldn't. So it was kind of just important to our coverage area. I did know that like doing the power rankings was a consistent sub-driver.

Did I love doing power rankings every week? No. no he didn't but if subs matter and I know that every week I'm going to publish power rankings and my byline on it and it's going to bring in a kind of little consistent consistent pool of subs every week then then yeah you go ahead and do those kind of things um you know so I don't think I would like not do a story because I knew it wouldn't drive subs and I at the same time I wouldn't be like okay well this is totally low hanging fruit I'll do this because it will but um I guess it's a little bit in your decision-making process. But my only example, or my best example, is the power rankings, probably.

Is it, I don't mean to pull up in any, you know, old scabs about, you know, complaints to your old bosses or whatever. It seems to me when you hire, when your business model is hiring established voices away from legacy establishments, newspapers, and magazines and stuff, and you're trying to build a subscriber base off of that. It feels sort of like it's like an advertising or a marketing issue more so as much as, as much as, it is like a product issue, right? Like you, like, was that ever part of the conversation? Just like, hey, if you want Bob Kravitz's fans to subscribe,

they're not just like lurking around Twitter looking for articles. Like they're wondering where Bob Kravitz is. How can we get to them separate from the athletic? Is that, was that ever part of the calculus? Yeah. I mean, I think like initially, you remember all of that, I mean, how many jokes to the rest of sports media make about the like, why I'm joining the athletic, you know,

because those were very concerted marketing efforts to say like, hi, if you followed me for my Broncos coverage, this is where you can read me now. They kind of moved away from that over the last couple. Probably what, 2019-ish was probably the last time that we did those. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a, you know, they did a really good job in initially bringing in all of those big names. And I think bringing in a lot of subscribers that would come with that. But yeah, I think it is a question of like, how do you keep, how do you keep doing? doing that. And I think it's a question, you know, when we talk about like marketing and the

stories and not the stuff that's just going to come up and SEO. I don't think it's a problem that's specific just to the athletic. I think it's kind of all of, you know, digital media now, too, of like when you have those unique to your publication stories, how do you get people to find them? And sports media now is very personality driven, right? And it's it is driven. It is driven by, you know, people want to know who the byline is and who's writing it and why they're writing it. Like, I'm constantly amazed at, like, the excellent job that, like, ESPN does when they have a big story of pushing the writers out there, getting them everywhere that have written those stories. It's Seth Wicker Sham and Don Van Nata on Sports Center, on ESPN Daily. They're on every

platform. And I don't, that's not something that the athletic tends to do a great job at. And I don't think a lot of other, I mean, there's probably a lot of organizations that don't necessarily do those things. And if you're a subscription model and you went out and spent a lot of money and hired, you know, these big names on the beats, then, you know, you should be putting your main college football analysts and reporters on every sort of platform that you can, that you can give them baseball hockey, you know, all around. Lindsay, the Athletic started out as an intensely local website, which also had some national writers and some national reporting units like NFL college football. How did you see that mission begin to shift? Yeah, I mean, there was a very substantial

change. I believe it was like spring of 2021. I believe, like winter of 2021 was when the kind of really the big reorg happened. Because yeah, I mean, we all remember. I heard you guys talking about it on an episode last week where you have like the athletic Dallas shirt. I have like a literal like a stack of the athletic Denver T-shirts. I have them in like from like a medium to like to XL. So if anybody wants an athletic Denver shirt, get me up, send me a DM. I've got them in my, I've got them in my closet somewhere, even though I never actually worked for the athletic Denver. I was always on the national vertical. But but yeah, I mean, that was that was the plan, right? That it was going to be athletic Bay Area. It was going to be athletic Detroit, athletic Chicago,

and then just really like take over every market. It was, and even if they weren't officially marketed that way. I don't know if there was ever like Athletic Phoenix gear or Athletic Houston gear. It was very clear that like it was built that way. There was an managing editor for the city site. And then there were the beatwriters for all of those teams. And then maybe a columnist like like Bob Kravitz was in Indianapolis or Jeff Schultz was in Atlanta.

And that kind of model changed that there was a massive reorg in 2021. Yeah, I guess it was 2021, where they didn't officially kill, like, the city site models, but somebody who was, like, the managing editor of the athletic Detroit, for example, would go somewhere else, would become, like, an editor on one of the sport verticals. So it shifted away from the city-specific sites to the sport verticals. And there was a lot of reasons that that made sense. I mean, the biggest one was that if you were, say, like, the managing editor of the athletic Miami, or the Athletic South Florida,

and you had hockey, baseball, football, pro football, college football, NBA. You were working all day, every day, 12 months a year. Like, you were overseeing every single.

So part of it was like, this is just not sustainable staffing-wise. So it made a lot of sense to like, let's try to kind of put people on, you know, really focus more on these sports verticals. But what that did, I think, was it broke up a bit,

of like what inherently made the athletic so special in those initial in those first few years where there was like each city site really had its own identity. I think the subscribers had like a really close relationship with those city sites and with their writers and felt like a really close connection with like because a lot of times you'd been reading those writers for a long time anyways like covering whatever, you know, your football team and then they went to cover they were they just switched beats, you know, they switched outlets so you followed along and then all of a sudden everybody kind of got shifted around and And there was, you know, the focus on the national verticals.

So, you know, there was never like an announcement, though. It was never like, hey, the Athletic Dallas no longer exists. But like in reality, it didn't, right? Because the editor who had, you know, that group was no longer one group. It was like, you know, the football writers were over here and the basketball writers were over here and, you know, the editor group. So that was kind of like the big formal split. And then the other things we just kind of have to.

follow the staffing moves and you would look at, like, there was a round of layoffs in the summer of 2020. And you would look and you'd say, are we not covering Arizona anymore? Like, you would just know, like the layoffs that happened then, right? It was like the sun's beat and it was the Cardinals beat. And all of a sudden it's just like, they're abandoning markets. And that was something that we had a lot of discussions about just amongst the staff of being like, well, what's happening? are we not going to cover these like entire cities anymore? And that was one of like just the harder things because like, you know, there are our friends and there are colleagues and, you know,

you care about the work that's being done there. And then you wonder like, well, what happens? Like we say we cover the entire NFL, but there's eight teams. I don't know the exact count off the hell of my head. But like, but then what do you do? You just don't cover those teams. Does those get picked up by national writers? Are you doing like regional NFL coverage?

a lot of those questions that they're still kind of grappling with now as more and more markets have been removed. And just to be clear, those questions were asking, there was not an answer. Yeah, I mean, I think like, yeah, I mean, we would have chances to ask them, I guess. You know, I don't want to get in too much into like, you know, internal meetings and stuff. I love a lot of people that work there and I don't want to get in trouble. But, but yeah, I mean, just a lot of like, well, wait, what are we going to do here? And sometimes you just have to follow along. I mean, I can say from my own experience, like, when I was, as a national NFL reporter, I would also, like, I wrote a Arizona Cardinals, you know, seven-round mock draft.

Because if you say you cover the whole league and we're going to have mock drafts or every team, but we don't have a beat writer covering Arizona Cardinals, somebody has to pick it up. And so, like, I, you know, I would do those things. And that's, you know, other people would do, you know, similar things, I think. And I think that's happening now a lot across all of. the sports, NBA, college football. You know, some of the places where the team beats, I mean, there's very few team beats in college

sports left at the athletic. And that was something that they really invested very, very heavily on early. And now it's, I don't know, we could probably go through and list them off, but it's not many. And it's hard to like retain your subscribers who joined because like you love LSU. I'm just picking a team at random. but now if no longer there's a dedicated LSU beatwriter, like what's your incentive to keep subscribing?

And that's the big challenge now for the athletics is to keep those people when the one thing that you, the thing that brought them in no longer exists. Well, Brian and I talked about it last week, and you and I chatted about it briefly off Mike. But it's, I said it was a matter of commitment, right? I mean, that when it comes to local coverage,

did you see attrition in terms of subscribers when the layoff started happening, that it's just, I mean, a subscription is a promise, but it feels like the promise from the other end isn't really being held up. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, specific numbers or anything like that,

and I wasn't on a local beat, so I never saw it firsthand, but you would see it, like, if you read the comment section of a story, right? Like, every single time that I would write about the Miami Dolphins, if you would go into the comment section,

you would literally, you would just, like, hold your breath. And you'd see, like, all of a sudden there were, like, 50 comments. And all it is is, is like, don't cover my team anymore. Where's my beat writer? Why, why, you know, why do you have, like,

why is Lindsay, who's Lindsay writing about, you know, five training camp battles to watch from the Dolphins or something? Like, we miss our beat writer. And as the writer's, like, what do you see? You can't, there's nothing you can really say. You can be like, I get it. I'm sorry, you know, like I wish we were, we wish this beat was fully staffed too. So I think that's where you would kind of see it. And it still happens. I think if there's a lot of, of different sports if you were to beats where if you were to look at the comments on the stories, there's people who are angry about it. And I totally, I totally understand that too. And I think a lot of times it does put the writers in a bad spot where like, we didn't make those decisions, right?

Like it wasn't my decision to not cover the Miami Dolphins. But when I'm writing about the dolphins, it becomes my problem because it's all over my stories that I'm writing or the tweets and that stuff. I am so fascinated by that. What was it? three, four, five year period, Lindsay, where writers at newspapers were enticed to come to the athletic. And they were working at places, including your old home, the Denver Post, where they were writing all the time and churning out these little mini articles all day. And the athletics pitch was, we're going to give you a lot more money. That's important. But also things are going to be different here. They're going to be better here for you, the newspaper sports writer, who may not

have had a fantastic experience at your old home. How did the athletic deliver on that proms? Yeah, I mean, I think it's hit or missed. I think, like, you know, the newsroom grew substantially, so I think everybody probably had a little bit different experience with it. You know, I will say the first couple of years, I mean, because I had that, I got that exact same pitch, right? I was at USA Today, not, I wasn't on like a daily, like, I wasn't covering the Broncos, you know, the Broncos beat right or anymore. But I did, I got that pitch, like, come, like, write the big, stories that you want to write, let's write features,

let's write impactful, long-form pieces. Like, you know, you're not going to be writing 300-word blog post or you're not going to be aggregating. And at that point, that summer,

I had been doing a lot of that at USA today. Like, we had scaled way back on training camp travel. You know, it was very clear that, like, what I would write from home from watching Tom Brady's press conference when he was, you know,

standing on the field in Foxborough would do quadruing quadruple the numbers than somebody who was on the ground in Foxborough, like, waiting a couple hours and trying to get exclusive access and stuff. And so, like, I saw that writing. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to go. I'm going to go do this. It sounds exciting. It sounds fun. And I think for a while, it really was like, it was like that. Like, you really were living that dream. And like the 2018 NFL season, my first season at The Athletic, it was like the most fun year I've ever had, I think, in journalism. Our NFL vertical was really small. We were all

pretty new. We were really excited. I pitched so many different things. I got to do everything I wanted. Challenge myself a lot. Got to travel as much as I wanted or as little as I wanted because at that point I had like a two and a half year old and I wasn't excited about traveling like every week. So I think for a while it really was that I mean that really, really did exist. The challenges is like how do you is that was is that sustainable? Like and I think the athletic realized by 2019 and then certainly 2020 when the pandemic hit, that that wasn't really like a sustainable model. And the way to bring in, like, this is all speculation or whatever, but like maybe we had gotten all of the people who just really wanted to read those features, you know, those like

unique features. Maybe we'd gotten all of those people who wanted to follow, you know, the Broncos diehards who had been reading me at the Denver Post. Like, I had already gotten those people, right? They had already followed me or they had followed Nikki Jobbala or Nick Kossmiter, whoever, you know, the Denver core, you know, the people who loved Ken Rosenthal had already, like, come in. So then what else do you do? The way that you really are going to drive traffic to your site is it is going to be aggregating stuff. It is going to be breaking news stuff. It is going to be like this snappier, buzzier headline type of thing. And, you know, so we kind of built out a news desk. It became much more about breaking news stuff, confirming, you know, obviously trying to break stuff as much as possible. And, you know, I think some of the athletic has some very good newsbreakers.

But a lot of times, even if you weren't breaking it, it was then following on an NFL beat. Okay, Adam Schaefter or Tom Pelliserra or Ian Rappaport reported something. And now we got to do the, they called it like news headlines, basically. It was like there'd be a news desk who would write up, according to Adam Schaefter, Delvin Cook is being cut by the Vikings. And then the Vikings beat writer, well, what does this mean in a paragraph from the Vikings' writer saying what this means and then a national writer like what's his mart what's dalvin cook's market going to be like and chime in the the couple hundred things so that was kind of the shift where

that felt a lot more like what we did at newspapers right we tried to do it very much like in an athletic voice um but you know kind of the the the cadence increased um the the asks for quick hit shorter stuff definitely increased and that's not necessarily a bad thing because like if you want to be a sports page and like a relevant sports site, you have to be reacting in real time to those things. But it would, the challenge was, is you recruited a lot of people and said, we're going to do everything different. Everything you did at newspapers, all that stuff you hated about your grind of your old job, that's out the window. And then all of a sudden it's like, but no, we do need you writing X number of times a week. And you are going to be on the hook for

X number of news headlines and social media posts. And, you know, all that other stuff where it felt a lot more like the newspaper stuff that a lot of us grew up doing. Did it, this is, I guess, a pretty open-ended question, but did it feel like you were headed towards the athletic being sold the whole time you were there? I mean, that's sort of how we, was it, did it exist to be sold? Yeah. I mean, it definitely existed to be sold. Like, I think I was kind of naive to like startup culture and how, all of that stuff was going to work. I would say by like after the pandemic, probably,

or after like, after we kind of got through the there is no access, how are we going to like survive? You know, there are no sports. Once we kind of got like through that part, I think it was like we were all just expecting like a sale was going to happen at some point. And yeah, I mean, I remember it being like, God, the rumors that we would hear about like where the athletic could get sold like Saudi investment firms or. fanatics or fan duel or whatever like and it was it was everywhere right there was like I think there was an axios thing and so anytime a story would come out you know everybody text each other going like oh shit is this the is this the one what does it mean if we get bought by axios um or

fanatics or whatever it is like what does that mean um so yeah it did feel like you know um it was a startup right and like they were building up the subscriber base so that we could be sold and the founders and all of the people who built up the company could make a lot of money because that's what, you know, that's what startups do. And, you know, I was probably kind of naive to it as this like, you know, like, you know, newspaper nerd who always just worked for big media newspaper companies about kind of how all of this stuff would work. And, you know, I know I personally didn't do nearly good enough job of getting equity and negotiating for equity and shares and all that stuff when I first joined. There were other people who did, and kudos to them,

because they made out much better in the sale than I did personally. But yeah, it definitely felt like, you know, an inevitability probably by like late 2020 into 2021 that it was a matter of when and not if. And then who was the big question. Last one for you, Lindsay, before we let you go, one of the protests we've heard from the former now New York Times sportswriters, in addition to being reassigned and losing their sports writing jobs is they are being replaced effectively at the times by non-unionized athletic writers. They're unionized, the athletic writers aren't. What were the union organizing efforts like when you were at the athletic? Yeah, I mean, I don't know how like in detail and like specific I can talk about it, but I know that

around the time of the, especially around the time at the sale, like when the New York Times sale went down. It was like, it's probably not great to be the only branch of companies that are owned by the New York Times that are not unionized. Wirecutter had just gotten a contract done. You know, obviously the Guild at that point, the New York Times Guild was kind of early in their negotiations, the ones that just wrapped up, what, about a month ago before all of this stuff went down. You know, I did think it was very interesting that David Perpich and that Wall Street journal story two weeks, a couple weeks ago. Like, he wasn't directly quoted. saying that he wouldn't oppose a union.

It was just kind of like, it was just like stated in there that he wouldn't oppose a union. Ultimately, I don't know how much that will like change kind of what's in progress with the athletic and the New York Times and everything right now

because like, I don't know if athletic staffers could be part of the New York Times Guild, but it would be a separate, but like would it be recognized, it would be okay if the athletic had their own guilds. It would make the, what they're doing, shuddering the department

and basically outsourcing the sports coverage to the athletic, like make it more palatable. That seems to be like what some of the statements that the Times Guild has put out. But like, it would be helpful. And I think for people that the athletic that are working there, but I totally get why the Times side is,

you know, the Times, they spent a lot in time negotiating minimum salaries for all reporters, including their sports reporters. the athletic doesn't have those sorts of things. I mean, there's just a lot of differences there. And, like, you can't just, there was a lot of, like, well, our D. York Times reporter is just going to get reassigned to the athletic. Well, I don't, all of the guild stuff, I don't think you can't just do that.

Like, it's not just a seamless, like, oh, Tyler Kettner, you cover baseball. Now you're just going to go cover baseball for the athletic. Like, it just doesn't work that way. So it's definitely something I'm going to be paying attention. Now that I'm on the outside of all of this stuff, like watching really closely, I just, you know, I think of the big thing there is like, I just, I loved working there. Like, I loved it. I had great bosses, great friends.

I just, I respect so many of the reporters and editors that are there. And I wanted to survive and thrive. It's better for our entire industry if, you know, if the athletic can continue to whatever this next evolution is going to be. But mostly, like, for my friends that still work there, like, I just want them to have a good working environment. Like, I want them to thrive in their careers and have development plans. And I want their work to be read everywhere and shared everywhere. And, you know, I guess now printed new pages of the New York Times, which is all funny. You know, looking back like when we got purchased, whenever it first happened, it was like,

you do not work for the New York Times. And now it's like, well, here you are. I think people could probably, you know, take pictures outside of the Times buildings now and not get chastised for doing so. that was a that was kind of a wild a wild moment um in all of this but yeah it's just it's been a really interesting couple years i guess but then obviously the last couple months for or shoot last two weeks really even where it's like almost every other day every day there's like some new story um about the future you know the future of the athletic i just i hope they figure it out right and i hope they they are able to figure it out in a way that um is fair to everybody at the times and

all of those reporters who are really, really good at their jobs, they're able to continue, you know, covering the big stories and the, you know, that Jenny Brentas gets to keep doing deep investigations into the NFL and other pro sports and, you know, athletes behaving badly. Like, I hope there's still a place for that because the times while their sports coverage is so different than what, you know, we consider like a normal sports page to do. They do really, really good and important work. And, you know, but I also really really, want the athletic to keep doing that like that granular, you know, that the daily beat journalism that so many people want. And hopefully they can just figure out a way that both places can continue to survive. And those reporters and writers and editors especially can kind of just keep doing good work. You can catch Lindsay Jones on Slow Newsday and everywhere else at the Ringer. We're glad you're here now. Lindsay, thanks for you. Yeah, we are. The big takeaway from all this. Thrill to be here. Yeah. Do you know How many subs you got from your seven-round Arizona Cardinals mock draft, by the way,

off the top of your head? It was not many. I'll just, I'll leave it. If you're carrying that with you, all right. We'll mail that down for the follow-up story. Yeah. Coming up in 30 seconds, journalists, meet your new coworker. His name is AI, and he just finished up his internship at GeoMedia.

But first, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. This week's runner-up involves the ludicrous and comically ambitious

rebranding of Twitter as X. Just X now. It was an overworked Twitter joke to put on your Kindle Roy voice and say it's, you know, Venmo meets Clubhouse meets eBay meets Chad GPT. Thanks to Don Steele,

Mitchell Tyler, and Matt Driffel for that one. But this week's winner comes from a photo that someone posted of physicist and biopic subject J. Robert Oppenheimer jumping into the air. I don't know if you saw this. The tweet read,

Oppenheimer had a reputation for being able to leap several feet from a stop and touch the ceiling. In our shared feed, you can imagine there quite a few NBA jokes. For instance, I would take Oppenheimer out to the perimeter, make him defend in space, hit him with an inside out,

dribble, and get right to the cup. Or, I hope they put Oppenheimer's silhouette on atomic bombs like they were Air Jordans. This one came from our friend Jason Concepcion. Now I am become Amare Stoutemeyer. Very deep cut on multiple levels. And finally, David, bro was messing with the wrong rockets. If you stretch forward for that gag, congrats.

You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. By the way, did you love on Twitter how everybody became J. Robert Oppenheimer experts? Oh, yeah. I mean, I heard people reacting to conventional wisdom about Oppenheimer that I had no idea existed. You know, journalists love this, right? Or you become an expert on something in a week, especially when there's a handy movie. or one book, in this case, it hits both of those that you can read. And everybody was an Oppenheimer expert.

I had no idea. No idea I was around all these people. We are all the New Yorker book review that regurgitates the book for the first three pages. It pretends they knew that before they started reviewing it. Very true. In the notebook dump, David, I want to introduce you to a new colleague here in the newsroom. He comes to us from Silicon Valley. He has no reporting experience or appreciable talent,

and he may eventually take your job. He is artificial intelligence. Let's all give it up in slack for our new coworker here in journalism. I say this because Ben Mullen and Nico Grant wrote a pretty freaky article in the New York Times. Google, they write, is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including the New York Times, the Washington Post,

and the Wall Street's journal's owner News Corps. The tool known internally by its working title, Genesis, and by the way, if you're going to replace us with robots, can you just go ahead and do it and not give it a scary sounding biblical name?

This is West World stuff. Yeah, it's crazy. Genesis? And not the cool Genesis project that went slightly Orion Star Trek, too, but just Genesis, which just kills us all. Anyway, Genesis can take... By the way, congratulations on resisting the urge to make the I-O-Y

or to get a Z in there somewhere. Just to trademark the name. Yeah. Genesis can take in information, details of current events, for example, and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product. So it's here, or it's about to be here, I think I said this before, but I'm going to say it again.

News organizations created this opening. We had a lot of news content that we were publishing. Remember all that junky, aggregated content that was written by actual humans, but could have been written by a machine? The thing that felt like it was written by a bot, so we said, what if we just go get a bot to do it? Traffic and SEO chasing by newspapers, by The Athletic. by websites.

I mean, it was all so stupid because what was the upside of any of that? I mean, what, even if, even if everybody had clicked, you're like, nobody's going to come back and read your site for this junk. Nobody's going to pay for your site to read this kind of junk. Well, but there's this, right.

You're absolutely right. You know, the rationale is that there's always a sort of duality to the way that we approach consumerism, right? It's like, well, if we want to do the, good stuff, we have to abide by the other stuff too, right?

I mean, you're right. You have to get them the crap. I remember, I know I've said this probably a handful of times on this podcast before, but I remember when you were working at the Daily Beast that whenever you'd get into a, you know, post whatever drinks conversation with one of your coworkers about what they, about their dream website, they'd always be like, here's what I want to do. Investigative journalism about like sub-Saharan Africa and also photo and also slide shows. It would always be an also slide shows because that's what was making a lot of money at the Daily Bs.

Because every time you went to that in that day and age, the idea that you would click through a link, but then you'd have to keep clicking to see the next photo and look at all that traffic and everything. And that was the listicle of its day, right? And everybody was like, I want to do something really awesome, really serious, really innovative, but you know, you've got to make your money, right? And I think we all have that. We all have that. I mean, in some ways, it's a healthy way to look at things.

I mean, if, you know, if you look at it from the other side, which is there is a sort of sacred piece of this that we will continue to do regardless and then we have to find a way to monetize it separately, well, then maybe a place like the athletic would have more editorial stability, right? If you're like, this part is sacred and then we figure out the crass modernization kind of separately, but everybody still gets paid. But you're right. what came across was not any sort of duality. It was this is the new publishing, right? When we're doing this sort of, this sort of soulless, mindless stuff, people started mistaking that for the part that I was just sort of calling sacred,

right? And now the sacred stuff's out the window, and AI can take our jobs. that's what I worry about is that even if you imagine this idea of somebody running a publication saying, all right, here's the crap and here's the sacred stuff, that they wouldn't look at the incentives to publish more and more crap, even if long term those are terrible incentives. Like when I worked in book publishing, we, you know, every publishing house would publish a couple of authors that maybe you wouldn't publish in a vacuum, but they made good money, right? They didn't match the rest of the publishing program. Maybe they weren't ideologically in line with the kind of stuff you were used to be doing.

just maybe they were, you know, I put it to one place that we published Sudoku books, the first American publisher of Sudoku, made a ton of money publishing Sudoku, didn't publish it. You know, that we weren't like, we didn't hire a games editor to try to figure out how to make more. We just let that money come in, you know, and I worked in another house and publishing house that published Bill O'Reilly and nothing else of the sort, right? You know, like Bill, Bill paid for the light bulbs, right? And we always kind of had to be at peace with that. But the difference between that and what you're talking about is that there is a sort of limited

quantity of Bill O'Reilly's in the world. Well, it seems like there's not these days, but you know what I mean. You know, there's a limited amount of Sudoku books that people are going to buy. In this case, you know, that sort of publishing could swallow like 75% of online journalism without trying too hard. Did you see the story in Geo Media the other day? Which one? What story? Well, Geo Media published an AI generated story.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I said, on you. Yes. Sorry, I misunderstood on. See, an AI robot would have made that clearer, but go ahead. No, no, no. Sorry, we need to replace the host of the press box with an AI-generated robot. The story listed all the Star Wars movies in chronological order. This is like half a second to appreciate what a non-idea that was to begin with.

Publish a list of the Star Wars movies in chronological order, meaning the order that the events in the movie take place, not the order that the Star Wars movies are made. That's just not an idea for a list at all. But the AI generating story, which had no human eyes on it, got it wrong. It got the list wrong. And this was something, again, if we had an intern and you gave them such an assignment like that and they bought it and you'd be like, yeah, what are we going to do? Are you going to, we're going to take a few days before we give this person another assignment?

But in fact, the Geo Media editorial director tells Peter Kafka is absolutely a thing we want to do more of. never mind that this thing that was worthless to begin with was also wrong. That's just unbelievable. The thing is, David, publications are already dipping their toes in the waters of AI, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press, whenever there's like an corporate earnings report, so this is just a basic thing, right? We made this much money in this quarter.

There is a story that is generated by AI for that. We're talking probably a couple of paragraphs because it just has the bare bones details and goes across the wires. we saw something like this pretty similar with game stories. Remember this a couple of years ago in the press box that would kind of put together a computer generated game story of just, you know, the Texas Rangers beat the Dodgers because they got a home run in the eighth inning, you know, took the lead in the eighth inning, so-and-so got the save kind of thing.

And if you think about stuff like that, you start to think, oh, okay, well, you know, if you don't fire the baseball writer, but you let the baseball writer concentrate on stuff that is more writerly and give them time to go down to the locker room, get interviews,

don't worry about having to write a gamer on a 10-minute deadline, concentrate on a juicier story. Same thing with the financial writer in the case of the earnings report. You tell us what it means, be bigger about it. That's not the worst thing in the world.

And the people who will tell you that there's an upside to AI in the newsroom will say, look, it's just the newest personal assistant. that's a phrase that appears in the New York Times article. Like Google, right? You and I, when we're doing research for an article, we plug it into Google. We do not go down to the basement of the ringer and look through the clip files.

People who do have interviews on their phones, they often get those magically transcribed. So they don't have to go through and word for word to the old laborious method of transcription. So we're okay with that, right? We're not worried. There's not like an anti-Google faction. in the media. But what this does is it then pushes it a little bit more. So what if, David, you edit a wrestling story?

And AI tells you, David, here are five possible headlines for the wrestling story you just edited. Do you want to pick one of these? And maybe alter it slightly for your purposes? Are we comfortable with that? Morally, I'm not sure. Practically, yeah. I mean, that's, you know,

that's like your relationship with your editor, a lot of the times, you know, if you have an editor that's really good at heads and decks, you let them have at it and you point it to one that works. Okay, so what if you find, let's say, let's go back to the financial example. What if these companies, some of these publications that cover those kind of things, start spitting out AI generated articles because they take the basic facts from an earnings call and throw out three or four paragraphs. We can publish those, maybe even label them as such,

but they are spit out pretty quickly in seconds, faster than it would take a human to do it, even if a human could do it pretty quickly, with AI. Are we okay with that? AI writing short articles? No, I mean, I think that the Google example is a slippery slope,

but it's the most compelling one, right? Where you could imagine a moral case for sort of letting AI write your first draft, but then you get into a much weirder terrain because returning a AI generated first draft into something new is not necessarily the skill set that anyone that you work with has. Right? I mean,

it's like, I'm sure everyone we know that everyone we work with could do that, but really like doing it in any sort of useful or functional way that doesn't over and overuse the AI's product or whatever. I mean, that's just a whole new job. And I don't, and I don't,

and then even. I don't think that that's, I just don't think that you get any, if you're not going to get a better product by letting the AI do it, and you're only talking about time constraints, then I think you're sort of having the wrong conversation. That's what's interesting to me,

is you're talking about the equivalent of a wire story that you're saving a matter of seconds by doing. Let's say you could have a human, do that, do a very, very quick write-through, which, by the way, would be pre-written anyway before the call, which is the numbers to be filled in in a couple of minutes. And human hands would get it up on the web in a couple of minutes. You're talking about doing it in seconds, and that's a trade-off. And the trade-off being also that then maybe AI creeps farther into the newsroom,

and we're just talking about headlines and stuff like that. It's also a very interesting article in Semaphore today by Ben Smith about all this. and he talks about there's this consortium of publishers, including The New York Times, Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Barry Diller, who runs IAC, and they're getting together to protect their interests, because here's a really interesting quandary when it comes to AI versus Google, which we just mentioned.

And this will be our obligatory professional wrestling reference of the day. Yes. Let's say I type into Google, who is the best intercontinental champion of all time. and one of the first hits is an article by David Shoemaker in the ringer, which is fantastic. I click on it. The ringer gets the credit for that, right? The ringer gets the click.

And I get the answer to my question. But what if what if I go to a chatbot and say, who is the greatest intercontinental champion of all time? And the chatbot gives me the answer from your article, but doesn't give you credit for it. It just simply tells me the answer is Razor Ramon. Well, what these publishers are saying is we're organizing because if tech companies don't give us lots of money for harvesting the information from our articles without credit, we could take you to court or make you pay large sums of money to do this. Yeah. Because you're saying, oh, it's what's more efficient Google. It's like, no, no, but it's our information without any credit.

credit to us without a link that leads you to us so that we're able to monetize it. I thought that was a really interesting wrinkle in this whole thing. No, I mean, I think that a lot of this conversation comes down to the sort of definition of AI, right? I mean, it's how we think about it. It's, and it's, I think until we sort of can agree to terms, it's really hard to out of the conversation, right? I mean, it's, I understand, Like, yeah, if you're going to publish something, you would like, you know, if you're, if you were, if you were publishing a piece on the greatest interkindle chairman of all time using the ringer's article, you would at least expect a hyperlink or some sort of, you know, written credit or tip of the cap. But if you're doing something transformative, or if Google just publishes the answer, sometimes, you know, the Google result will publish the list. I mean, I know that's problematic in its own way. If you had a researcher, if I, if you had a ringer intern, go out and, you know,

and say, hey, go find all the top 10 lists of best intercontinental champions and let me know whose names are on there and they just give you one unified list, you know, is it like, that's, it's sloppy, but, you know, these are, these aren't unheard of practices, but we just don't really know how we think of AI. Is it just a search tool? Is it, is it sort, I mean, what is it? How do we think of it? And that's the question, right? And I think the answer is going to be everything, a search tool, something that could potentially help journalists or publications, write

articles, something that's going to make that faulty Star Wars list. It's a lot of different things. So you're right. Defining the terms of what it is and how newsrooms use it will be the most important part of this. But I'm telling you, I think the answer is going to be

a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. Lastly, before we go, I mentioned Barbie high culture references on last week's show that any time there's an interview about Barbie, the actors or filmmakers are required to throw out a few

high culture nods just to make sure that people reading this know that this is not some Mattel Cheapo you know, IP squeezing kind of movie. New York Times interview included references to Warhol's painting of a Campbell soup can

and the hero with a thousand faces. Here's another example, David. This is from an L profile of director Greta Gerwig. Mm-hmm. Quoting here, she talks about John Milton's

Paradise Lost and the idea there is no poetry without pain, one of many perhaps unexpected references, including Vincent

Minnellys an American in Paris, Jacques Tate's Mon Uncle, and Powell and Pressburger's stairway to heaven.

She has brought to the project. Again, it's like a toy at the bottom of a cereal box. There's at least

one in every box. Oh, that's great. One high culture reference. Speaking of high culture, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Friday's headline about the New York Jets'

Quinn and Williams' massive new contract was Q Hall. Today's headline comes from the Daily Mirror over there in the UK. It's about Brian Harmon, the winner of this week's Open Championship. Harmon, who is from Georgia, was not someone who the non-Golf media

knew a ton about. so everybody kind of had to pull an Oppenheimer and get up to speed pretty quickly. And the British press went nuts. After finding a quote, Harmon gave after missing the cut at the Masters, he had said, I went and I killed a pig Friday night at my farm

and I killed a turkey Saturday morning. That's how you get over the cut, get over missing the cut at a major. So he likes hunting. He is excited by hunting. What was the Daily Mirror's strained pun headline? What was the piece about, just about his love of hunting, or was it about him winning the Masters? No, no, or winning the Open Championship.

Sorry, winning the Open Championship. It was about his love of hunting. This is before he actually won. Love, love of hunting, thrill of the chase. You might also think of an ACDC song here. For those who like to know. I shoot. Back in black.

I shoot to Shoot to kill Except it excites me Shoot to thrill I shoot to thrill Is the headline We were looking for in the daily mirror Wow

He is David Shoemaker I'm Brian Curtis David Not terribly moved by that headline Production Magic By Erica Servantes I'm back later this week And then Chewaker and I

Regroup Monday for more Loquorm takes about the media See you then David See you later Ryan You're right