Marc-Antoine Godin no longer with The Athletic

Sad news on the Montreal Canadiens beat .

Marc-Antoine Godin has just announced that, as part of the wave of cuts announced at The Athletic, the journalist will no longer be covering the Habs for the platform. He has lost his job.

Note that 20 field journalists lost their jobs to the platform. This represents about 4% of field journalists who will have to find other work.

So it’s not, as Godin says, because of the quality of his work: it’s because of circumstances.

As you may know, it’s currently very hard to make sports platforms profitable. For several months now, let’s just say that the money hasn’t been there as much as it used to be.

This affects both small and large companies.

But it’s sad news nonetheless. Marc-Antoine Godin is very, very good at dissecting and analyzing situations at the Montreal Canadiens.

But above all, the duo he formed with Arpon Basu was very good.

I always found The Athletic to be very “Montreal” in content, with Godin translating Basu’s texts and vice versa. This allowed everyone to read the content in both languages.

And that’s not counting the collaborations with other journalists from other cities, or even the texts the two men signed together.

I wonder how the CH will now be treated on The Athletic without the francophone journalist. Will the (bilingual) podcast live on? That remains to be seen.

It’s a blow to the coverage of the Habs.

Extension

Let’s hope Godin can find his way back to something, but it may not be easy. After all, if he’s been cut, it’s an indicator of how the sports media is doing.

As he said, it’s not because of the quality of his work that he’s at home this morning.

From what we hear, this may not be the last cut in the sports world. At Le Journal de Montréal, the sports section could also suffer the wrath of the market.

Mathieu Boulay, Jean-François Chaumont, Jonathan Bernier, Dave Lévesque and Benoît Rioux all work in the sports department at JdeM.