Bob Kravitz Rips The Athletic For Having A Terrible Culture
I tried to tell you. Maybe more people will listen to me now. The Athletic is a garbage publication. This time I’m not the only one saying it. Now one of their former writers is too. Bob Kravitz is back in the writing scene and he UNLOADED a bomb on his former employer.
Kravitz wrote a post about The Athletic on his new Substack page as his debut post. Kravitz, the long time Colts reporter, essentially said The Athletic has an awful culture and they don’t care about human beings.
“I wasn’t happy that they put me on probation just a few months after a quadruple bypass in 2020. (And during the pandemic, no less). I guess my numbers weren’t what they wanted, but hell, I was recovering from a life-changing medical event,” Kravitz wrote.
“You would think that might have some impact on their thinking, but no. I had to produce 395 subscriptions in three months – or else. That’s absurd, unfair and outrageous, especially given my health situation. Well, I survived, producing more than 400 subs by working myself half to death, a great idea after open-heart surgery. But that soured me on the place forever. I felt it in my bones:
Kravitz, 63, also talked about how The Athletic doesn’t value mental health and they were completely dysfunctional in terms of setting agendas for their writers.
“I wasn’t happy that I had four editors in four years, all of them wanting something different. Write long-form pieces. OK, fine. No, write strong opinion columns. OK, fine. No, write about roster construction (what?). The goalposts kept moving, and they’re still moving with the New York Times’ acquisition of The Athletic,” Kravitz said,
“And the metrics…everything was metrics. (Add “old man yelling at cloud” gif) I understand that’s the current way of the world in a media business that is almost universally struggling, but the numbers were in our faces – and on our minds – 24/7.
“The Athletic makes a really big deal about the importance of mental health, and that’s great, but I think I’m speaking for a majority of current Athletic writers, the primacy of metrics (subs, unique views and the rest) had a deleterious impact on our collective mental health as a staff. There was nothing more dispiriting than working your ass off on a story, only to look at the metrics and see one subscription and 2,000 unique views. It was soul-sucking, honestly.”
Is anyone surprised by this? If you are then you haven’t been paying attention. It’s a bad product and are on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s why the NY Times disbanded its sports division. It’s a black hole of dysfunction that destroys everything that gets in bed with it. It is only a matter of time before that place goes under. They need an unrealistic amount of subscriptions to stay afloat.
Great work, Bob. If you want to read more, feel free to do so. His Substack is linked above in paragraph two.
