Thread by @jeffjarvis

Here is @pilhofer's excellent analysis of the @nytimes acquisition of @TheAthletic and its likely impact on local newspapers: not good news for them. I have a few more thoughts & questions. 1/
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It's becoming clear to me and I think others that The Times now values total subs as its key metric and so it is acquiring a bunch of new subscribers to get it impressively close to its audacious goal of 10 million paying subs. Mazel. 2/

Thus I'm guessing that The Times will add more subscription products alongside sports, food, & puzzles. Sports seems obvious but The Times is not a sports paper a la @NYDNSports. So it needed to acquire something. Here comes The Athletic, in need of a home. Kismet. /3

I'm not a sports fan so I'm way out of my depth here. I don't know about the quality of local newspaper sections anymore. I don't fully understand the problems at ESPN. What interests me about what The Times brings is not so much editorial but marketing. Can it sell & retain? 4/

Thus the dynamics that most interest me are the subscriber acquisition cost--something hardly ever discussed in the industry's love affair with paywalls--as well as churn and ARPU. That the two sub bases are complementary makes me ask how much benefit The Times will bring. 5/

It's being pointed out that The Times can bring advertising to The Athletic. Yes. But in my days in newspapers, sports had very little endemic advertising (tire ads: a sexist presumption). Sports betting? Yes. But how appropriate is that to The Times brand? Hmmm. 6/

What interests me next is what other new sub products The Times might offer. Business? Way too much competition. Entertainment? Ditto & my baby, @EW, is not exactly on fire. Home? Maybe for rich folk. Health? Naw. 7/

I think new subscription products will need to break out of the old taxonomy of the newspapers: new services for other interests taking forms besides just content--e.g., community, education, events. But I think The Times will hit a wall on consumer willingness to pay. 8/

As for local papers: Perhaps foolishly, I'm less dystopic in this regard than Aron because in my paper experience sports readership was a minority, necessary for the attention-based, mass-media ad model now fading. I could be very wrong. 9/

That is, in the old myth of mass media, we sold all readers to all advertisers and thus low readership for, say, sports or bridge columns was still valuable as we sold them all to the advertisers anyway. That was yesterday. It's gone. 10/

I have long been wondering what a highly focused local news operation that <cough> does what it does best--local--and links to the rest looks like as a smaller, sustainable enterprise. That's what I explored here. 11/
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And here: 12/
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Finally the point. Bottom line, I very much agree with @pilhofer that The Times is no friend of local papers. It could have been. It's not now. So, yes, local papers are even more vulnerable. Add in Axios & Politico trying to go local (with a fair amount of blind hubris). 13/

Local newspapers could have banded together to compete on content & advertising; they did, and blew it big time in not supporting New Century Network. Alden, which now controls (too) many papers is not going to invest a nickel in innovation. 14/

So I think the real discussion Aron raises isn't so much about sports but about--once again--whither legacy local newspapers. Are they worth tending still? Some yes, some no. 15/

My real hope goes to other ventures, like @pilhofer's own @tinynewsco, @city_bureau, @media_outlier, @SpaceshipMedia, @THECITYNY, @TexasTribune--my usual list. We need much, much more innovation and investment at this level. I trust @jimbrady at @knightfdn will be a big help. /16

P.S. I don't miss flying or hotels. I don't miss most conferences. But I do miss getting to see pals like @pilhofer to have discussions such as this over beer instead of just Twitter. I'm keeping my fingers cross that Omicron allows @journalismfest!