One of the preeminent sports media insiders in the country, Andrew Marchand was announced Tuesday as the newest addition to the staff at The Athletic. Marchand will be covering sports business and media, an area all too familiar to Richard Deitsch.
Deitsch, who is a media reporter for The Athletic and host of the Sports Media podcast, joined Bernstein & Holmes on 670 The Score in Chicago Tuesday and offered his reaction.
“Yes, I did know about this prior to the news breaking,” Deitsch explained. He said he knew of Marchand’s arrival about two weeks ago. “Marchand is a tremendous news breaker and will add, I think, fantastic coverage in that area.”
Richard didn’t feel like he was being infringed upon by the outlet bringing in another sports media writer. He took it as a compliment considering several other topic areas The Athletic covers have multiple writers on staff.
“The reality is, I can just tell you this. I’m not trying to come off like a self-promoting ass, but my stuff does really good traffic,” Deitsch said. “And what it tells you is that there’s much more of an interest in sports media than I think generally editorial managers ever realized and knew.”
Deitsch added that he felt like there shouldn’t be any issues with either him or Andrew Marchand covering the stories they want to cover.
“There’s enough to go around in terms of the real meta stuff,” he said. “I just think Marchand and I are very different. We’re different writers, we like different things. I think we have different strengths, so I think it could work. The proof will be in the pudding. The Athletic has done a good job in terms of really loading up in areas where they think that they can get interest. There’s a reason we have 15 college football writers. Whatever it is, 40 NFL writers. We have multiple NASCAR or racing writers.”
“Marchand is a very, very skilled news breaker and I would expect him to be doing the same things for us as he did for the New York Post,” Richard Deitsch continued.
