Did The Athletic Tweet An SOS?

Nobody likes this job, or maybe they do.

On Monday, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship for the first time ever and The Athletic laid off 20 reporters. The sports website, owned by The New York Times, not only slashed 4 percent of its newsroom, but also changed its priorities: journalists will no longer cover their current sports team beats to take on more general assignment roles.

The Athletic’s publisher David Perpich and executive editor Steven Ginsberg wrote in a note to staff that The Athletic will commit “dedicated beat reporters” to cover the teams “that most consistently produce stories that appeal to both large and news-hungry fan bases, as well as leaguewide audiences.” It’s a tale as old as time in the digital media layoff era. Every site pivots to a more universal SEO-friendly strategy at some point, and the reporters who make the sites great are left behind. 

In a tweet on Tuesday, whoever runs The Athletic’s Twitter purportedly posted a cry for help. It was a simple tweet quoting the Nuggets’ power forward, Nikola Jokic. The two-time MVP led the team to victory over the Miami Heat Monday night with 28 points, 16 rebounds, and four assists. After the 94-89 win, Jokic was tired and ready to go home. “Nobody likes his job, or maybe they do. They’re lying,” he told reporters at a press conference. 

Quoting the tweet, The Athletic wrote, “Nikola Jokic is just like us.”

i respect the atheltic for posting this right after layoffs https://t.co/AoB6GGF8w5

— David Grossman (@davidgross_man) June 13, 2023

Was it an SOS about the website’s pivot away from dedicating as much talent to local sports reporting? Did someone on the social media team snooze their Slack notifications and then go completely, but subtly, rogue?

As Defector writer Lauren Theisen points out, The Athletic’s new business decision is one we’ve seen in sports media before. “It’s the same logic that leads to ESPN covering the Knicks, no matter how they’re playing, more closely than the Nuggets,” she writes. She further determines that these layoffs are particularly cruel if we consider how local talent was poached to report for the national publication. “There’s the cruelty of snagging beat writers for the short term, contributing to the decimation of their old employers, and then shooting them back out into a nearly nonexistent job market.” 

We’ve already seen a record number of media layoffs this year — at least 17,436 job cuts in 2023. Every week, another outlet announces newsroom cuts, and the rest of us sit back and analyze the gigification of journalism, the collapsing digital media economy, and what this all means for our democracy. 

Perhaps many of us aboard the sinking ship are feeling the same way: nobody likes this job, or maybe they do. But the uncertainty is hard to stand. At the very least, why not post one fire tweet before you go?

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