In the last 15 years, the world of journalism has shifted completely. People are trading in their Sunday morning papers for online subscriptions. While this has been apparent in all journalism sectors, it has drastically impacted sports journalism. The shift from paper to screen has allowed apps such as The Athletic to thrive in response to the changing industry.
The Athletic is a subscription-based sports journalism website that was founded in 2016. The site was created by two friends, Alex Mather and Adam Hannsman, with the goal of becoming the sports page for every city worldwide. In a 2017 interview with the New York Times, Mather discussed the goals of the company, “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing”. The two didn’t want to just create a company that would provide viewers with sports journalism, they wanted to run the entire sports journalism industry across the globe. Mather and Hannsman were at the front of a frontier movement that would evolve the world of sports journalism by making it subscription-based.
Over the next few years, The Athletic did just that. The website hired beat writers from newspapers and media outlets all over the country to write and report for the site. The company had success just three years after its founding. In 2019, the company had 600,000 paying subscribers and was on track to be at the top of the sports journalism world. The company offered what many others couldn’t: pure and authentic sports journalism built on subscriptions rather than the usual reliance on ad revenue.
While the model separated the company from competitors, what really contributed to its growth was the quality of the writing and reporting. One of the biggest stories The Athletic ever broke was an article written by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich that accused the Houston Astros of illegally stealing signs in their 2017 season. While the media breaking any sort of cheating scandal is important, calling out the 2017 World Series champs was another level. The two cited four whistleblowers who revealed the Astros had a camera ready to steal signs. The report shocked the sports world and gave The Athletic immense amounts of fame sending it to the top of the charts. The Athletic also provided features that separated themselves from the competition. Just recently, the Athletic released a feature on Amit Patel, An employee who stole 22 million from the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Athletic was Patel’s first interview since he was sentenced to prison, and provided deep insight into how and why he stole the money from the Jaguars. This model of breaking big stories and high quality features continued to work for the company; they reached 1.2 million subscribers by December of 2021 when they were bought soon after by the New York Times for the steep price of 550 million dollars in January 2022. The Athletic would go on to fully replace The New York Times sports desk and become the main source of sports journalism for the newspaper titan. Today, the company has over 400 full-time writers and covers 47 North American markets. Subscribers have access to basic stories, game and score updates, long-term stories, breaking news, podcasts, chatrooms (to discuss games with writers and fans), and much more. Through The Athletic viewers can read a story on the latest NASCAR race and then about Premier League soccer on the same platform. Mather and Hannsman created what all sports fans wanted: a place where they could go to have all the in-depth sports news they could ever need. As a result, the sports journalism world will forever be revolutionized.