The Athletic continues to shake up traditional sports media

Update July 21, 2023: A lot has happened since I posted this. The New York Times bought The Athletic for $550 million in 2022, and it’s continuing to lose money. This month, NYT closed its own sports department, replacing it with stories from The Athletic and receiving criticism that this was a union-busting move. NYT also started moving away from The Athletic’s original mission of team by team coverage across the nation in favor of more nationally focused content. This included laying off 20 team- or city-focused journalists, including some good ones. One of them publicly ripped The Athletic for its obsession with metrics (subscriptions created) over quality content.

Original post: Occasionally I like to highlight interesting and useful research into journalism, because usually it gets lost in dense academic journals that no one ever reads. At least not voluntarily.

The beat reporter for a professional sports team that I follow tweeted this week that he signed “a multi-year extension” with The Athletic, a four-year-old website that specializes in long enterprise stories about college and pro sports teams. In light of the decline of many sports news organizations – Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Bleacher Report and almost every newspaper sports department under the sun – The Athletic is showing a whole lot of confidence in itself.

The past decade has beaten up on local and regional sports departments, with layoffs, travel reductions, diminished access to sources and the rise of team PR sites. Then along came The Athletic in 2016 with its millions of dollars in investment money and the co-founder’s pledge to “let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing.”

Since then, the subscription-based sports website has sent major reverberations through the sports journalism world by hiring away top reporters, converting some readers, and causing many existing sports departments to debate whether to compete with The Athletic or surrender and differentiate their content.

The Athletic has a network of team-focused sites in more than 50 markets with pro and college teams, including the University of Alabama (Auburn University is sporadically covered at the moment). The company says it has surpassed 1 million subscribers and expects to begin making a profit in 2021. Its impact, therefore, is worth understanding.

That’s what four researchers in UA’s College of Communication have helped to do in their article “Poaching the News Producers: The Athletic’s Effect on Sports in Hometown Newspapers,” which was published online ($) recently by Journalism Studies. My professor colleagues Dr. Andrew C. Billings and Dr. Sean Sadri, along with doctoral students Nicholas R. Buzzelli (first author) and Patrick Gentile, interviewed 22 sports editors and producers in U.S. markets where The Athletic has established a site.

The Athletic has lured established beat reporters from newspapers by offering higher salaries (sometimes double) and greater editorial freedom, according to the interviews. (Its primary UA reporter is Aaron Suttles, who worked for many years for the Tuscaloosa News.) Local sports editors had mostly weak counterarguments (“weak” is my word) for their reporters to stay put, with the exception of pointing out that The Athletic’s long-term survival isn’t assured. I sensed some sour feelings. One editor said The Athletic hires “Twitter celebrities, as opposed to actually good journalists.”

The Athletic focuses on in-depth stories, not a team’s daily happenings, so sports editors split on whether it represents direct competition. Most believe they differentiate themselves by offering day-to-day coverage in volume. A few, though, said they have put greater priority on long-form storytelling to better contend.

With the popularity of sports, isn’t there room for everyone? Perhaps not, at least not in markets where local outlets also sell subscriptions. Other research shows that most news consumers do not wish to pay for their news, and among those who are willing to do so, the most typical number of paid subscriptions is only one. As the UA article says, it’s a zero-sum game.

I have seen one other effect of The Athletic, based purely on anecdotal evidence. I follow several pro sports teams in cities where a long-time newspaper beat writer jumped to The Athletic. In each case, the writer’s coverage got more aggressive and appropriately critical. That’s a good thing. It reflects, I think, a superior editorial culture at The Athletic compared to some local newsrooms. It may also reflect institutional constraints that can temper the journalism of hometown outlets.     

Despite The Athletic’s remarkable success in producing high-quality work, adding subscribers, raising investment money and expanding to new cities, there’s no guarantee a purely subscription business model can sustain this large and expensive operation long term. In a setback that the company attributed strictly to the coronavirus shutdown, The Athletic laid off 8 percent of its staff and cut salaries across the board in June. Looking down the road, many of the editors interviewed by the UA researchers “wonder if its model is sustainable for fans who prefer quantity over quality.”

But the researchers note that, having come this far, The Athletic has given everyone hope that subscriptions can become a new, sustainable strategy to pay for good sports journalism. “Perhaps The Athletic’s most profound impact on sports media has been normalizing the paywall.”

Amen to that. But I also hope The Athletic demonstrates to everyone the journalistic and commercial value of innovative, in-depth stories about sports. If competing newsrooms choose to surrender that kind of coverage to The Athletic and instead focus on endless churning of routine stuff, that would be a shame.