#29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

[dekedangle_rpf_mod]

This is the twenty-ninth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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Comments

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Pittsburgh media behaving badly is a fandom, right?

So this guy who used to work for Dejan Kovacevic's website says that he just discovered that they have had the password to and been monitoring all his Twitter account activity ever since he was fired last year. Like, wtf holy shit.
https://twitter.com/ASaunders_PGH/status/875409667022868484

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Holy shit that is insanity. But also - he should have changed his password after he was fired.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I honestly wonder if they could lose credentials for this. That's just really unethical even if keeping the pw the same is on him.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

He'd have to prove it, first, maybe by suing? And that'd be expensive - I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't want to.

In the comments to one of the tweets he says they blocked him a long time ago, which is just amazing. They're using Twitter as a professional platform, but they block their own ex-employees? Loooool.

They also blocked me once, back when I was still subscribed. It has to be have been because I liked a Steve Dangle tweet making fun of DK. I emailed them and they unblocked me, but omg. Yes, when you block people on Twitter willy-nilly, that means you sometimes block your own paying customers. What a trash fire. /csb

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes I want to subscribe because I do think Yohe is pretty plugged in to the Pens. But Dejan is so fucking petty and sanctimous and a giant pain in the ass that it always hold me back.

He's also a dirty twitter deleter and it annoys me.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Yohe was at his best under the editorial control of an actual newspaper. DK's site is much more fanservice-y, and while part of me loves that Yohe is attuned to the interpersonal aspect, sometimes it starts to have a too-gossipy tone to it, and you can see where it's eaten into the journalistic quality and integrity of his work, e.g., his eye-rolling ~~feeling~~ that the Pens players thought Ovechkin purposefully aimed a shot at Hainsey. DK's site is where journalistic ethics go to die.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

nonnie below you

Yes to all this. I don't remember feeling strongly about Yohe one way or the other back when he was with the Trib, but now he's almost as bad as DK.

DK's site is where journalistic ethics go to die.

Truer words.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

He's a what?

Yohe was good for, like, human-interest content. He told a lot of good stories about things like Sid going real-estate shopping with Cullen. But everyone on that site was(/is, I assume) completely overheated about the actual hockey. They were exhausting. Like Rossi, except marginally better written and marginally less creepy.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

He's a dirty deleter. He gets in fights on twitter and then goes back and deletes his side of the fight later.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

also ayrt [again]

Thank you both so much for your DK/Yohe info. I doubt I'll ever subscribe, I don't mind the gossip-y/fanservice/human interest thing and would honestly be mostly there for the fun stories. Especially because I think the Trib reporters and all of the PG reporters do a better job with the actual hockey part than Yohe/Dejan/Rossi ever did.

TBH I unfollowed Yohe on twitter because he doesn't ever really POST anything anymore it's just redirects to the paywalled site [for obvious reasons] but that eliminated most of my desire to subscribe. If I don't know I'm missing it - I don't miss it!

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if Taylor Haase was involved in this lmao. I wouldn't be surprised, considering how odious she was on tumblr.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

is/was she pittsburghpengwins? because if so, one of my tumblr buds didn't *confirm* this but did have the same general thought that she might have been involved.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Any plans I had ever to subscribe are over now.

https://twitter.com/daninpittsburgh/status/876750736071282689

(For those who don't want to click. Apparently to get access to the super special Stanley cup content that was released today you *must* be a 3 year or lifetime subscribe. They've basically created a paywall within the paywall #paywallception)

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, that's next level dickery.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I don't love paywalls in general, but site upkeep/hopefully paying contributors something/etc. makes them a quasi-reasonable business model that's not that different imo than paying for an old-school newspaper subscription.

I totally agree that this is next level dickery, though. Especially since it sounds like this was JUST announced as opposed to informing new subscribers that hey, if you pay for a long-term or lifetime contract you'll get bonus content up front or even giving them an option to pay for the extra coverage NOW as a one-time thing if they don't qualify .

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

NA This to me is kind of like the difference between buying a pro/paid version of an app, which I'm okay with compared to the freemiun pay to win games where they keep trying to gouge every little thing they can out of their customers.

Even if announced ahead of time, I can't day I'd be interested in a site whose coverage is tier based.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I'm pretty okay with paywalls as a concept, even as I resent them personally when something I want to read is behind them. But I like to be able to support quality content.

However, this is a whole other thing. Why would you rile up your PAYING CUSTOMERS by a) not making this clear to them in advance and b) not giving them the option to buy now, as you suggest? Like, at this point the site is actively turning away money that people might otherwise be inclined to give them for this one-time package.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

A one time payment isn't a sustainable increase in revenue, though. Either way it's really shitty to spring it on people suddenly and those optics don't help their case.

Just to get the facts straight: Basically they just announced that only lifetime and three year plan subscribers will get exclusive new content? And they are giving current shorter plan subscribers a chance to migrate to longer plans?

Imo they really should offer discounts on the long-term plans for current subscribers if that's what they're doing.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Why though? Content costs money. Adblockers and illegal streams and paid content that's posted without authorization is why online publications are struggling. The layoffs and force reduction that's been happening at Yahoo and ESPN and others doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are obviously a lot of other, arguably larger, forces at play, but this is definitely part of it.

The three years and lifetime (what does that even mean? it does sound ominous ngl) subscription restriction is pretty extreme, but if that's what's needed for their business model to stay afloat so they can keep producing more content and hiring and paying good writers (which is a big if, and I don't know if true at all) than I'd support it.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

I think the issue here is not that they have graduated subscription levels, but that they apparently didn't inform one-year or monthly subscribers beforehand that they might miss out on content. Looking at the website, they're offering an "upgrade" to the 3-year level to people who already subscribe, but I can't tell whether you get a discount for the the 3-year level if you've already paid for a 1-year subscription (which you should!).

Also, it's not like they charge you for the subscription on a monthly basis; if you want the 3-year subscription, you have to pay the entire $66 up front, putting it out of reach for some people who might otherwise be willing to pay what amounts to $1.83 a month.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

Absolutely no one is failing to understand that fact that content costs money, or mad about that. The people who are affected by this and angry about it have already agreed that they want to pay money for that content. What's unfair and shady here is that in changing things up by suddenly adding an exceptional paywall behind a paywall, DK is not only requiring that month-to-month or 1-year subscribers take a loss compared to longer term subscribers in order to see that content (unless he will retroactively credit what they've already paid towards the longer sub, since paying month-to-month and then changing to lifetime is less economical than having just paid for lifetime in the first place), it's also asking for a large outlay of money for an inherently risky/unstable return, JUST for the sake of a one-off collection of material that may be redundant (what is in it that DK hasn't already covered? or any of the numerous other media that covered the event?). If I've already been paying every month to see your content, I'm not going to be happy if you suddenly tell me I need to fork over an additional 300 dollars or whatever for something I was already expecting as part of my month-to-month.

He would have been better off doing what I saw someone else suggest, which is offer their playoff content as a package to the general public as a one-time purchase. A lot of fans would probably go for that after the high of a Cup-win, and he might have ended up keeping some of them as subscribers. This way, he's just pissing off people who have already been paying him.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

You can't change terms of service on people with no warning. They should have been informed ahead of time there would be content not available to one-year subscribers. This just sounds like a last-minute ploy to get people to extend their subscriptions — and honestly, if they are resorting to that, I'd be worried they weren't going to be around in 3 years for me to get my money's worth anyway.

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

what's this foam brick cash grab he references?

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

don't know for sure, but googling "foam brick cash grab" and picking the link that looked most relevant off the first page of results gave me this post from last year.

http://www.voy.com/158430/21404.html

among other things (you'll have to scroll through the post if you want to read the full details but i tried to provide a reasonable summary of potentially relevant info):

a--the "foam brick" thing definitely was a cash grab. he deletes comments that don't contain profanity/other offensive language but *do* contain criticism, including a subscriber comment made when he first floated the idea of the $50 brick. That subscriber works at a non-profit and knows firsthand that the brick idea is a no-no for a for-profit company.

it's fine as a *non-profit* thing because if a legit by IRS standards charity/non-profit sells $50 foam bricks as a fund-raiser, people can claim most of that as a charitable contribution on their taxes if they're itemizing deductions and the charity provides them with whatever paperwork may be necessary. (if you're *getting* something for making a donation, normally you can only deduct the difference between your donation and the theoretical fair market value of that something. so if the fair market value of the foam brick is $5, this would probably be a $45 deduction, not a $50 one. or at least that's how they explained it to me in tax preparer training.)

with a for-profit set-up, you're essentially paying $50 for merch worth about $5 tops *and* can't claim a deduction so cash grab is a pretty accurate description imo.

b--the first commenter claims dk's site is operating very much on a month-to-month basis and that travel expenses for last year's SCF were *definitely* a strain on the operating budget.

c--dk expanded more quickly than he should have and is in financial trouble partly because of that.

d--he's arguably made poor personnel decisions (at least last year he apparently had both a multimedia director and a social media person who may or may not have been getting paid and i assume was taylor haase of tumblr notoriety, but the site doesn't really have enough video to need a full-time multimedia person and it sounds like their twitter could probably have been bundled into somebody else's job duties as well.)

e--somebody else said "Oh, and also........the rumors that he lets people go via text message is 100% TRUE."

Re: Hockey Media

[(Anonymous)]

That comment thread was a great read for schadenfreude.