The Athletic is a subscription-based sports website covering professional and college teams in Chicago, Toronto, and more than 20 other North American cities. The site also covers national stories in football, basketball, baseball, and hockey through a mix of long-form journalism, original reporting, and podcasts. Their business model is predicated on dis-aggregating the sports section of local newspapers and reaching non-local fans that are not reached by a local newspaper.
Video The Athletic
History
The Athletic was founded by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, former coworkers at subscription-based fitness company Strava, with the mission of producing "smarter coverage for die-hard fans." The company was built as an alternative to the struggling ad-supported models. The Athletic relies on subscriptions, not advertising revenue, to support the business. "We've removed ads, pop-ups, and auto-play videos, giving subscribers a vastly better reading experience. And we've said goodbye to click-bait, allowing the nation's best sports writers to focus on producing high-quality, substantive coverage for The Athletic, without the pressure of generating clicks."
The site originally launched in Chicago in January 2016, with Jon Greenberg serving as the founding editor, along with Sahadev Sharma (Cubs) and Scott Powers (Blackhawks). Greenberg and Powers previously worked at ESPN Chicago, while Sharma left Baseball Prospectus' Cubs vertical to join the website. The company participated in Y Combinator during the summer of 2016.
In October 2016, The Athletic expanded to a second city, Toronto, to focus on Maple Leafs, Raptors, and Blue Jays coverage. The Athletic hired James Mirtle as editor-in-chief for Toronto. Mirtle spent over a decade as a sportswriter at The Globe and Mail before joining The Athletic. A third city, Cleveland, launched in March 2017, with Jason Lloyd as editor-in-chief. The Athletic continued city expansion to Detroit in June 2017.
The first major funding was provided by Courtside Ventures, which provided $2.3 million in seed funding. In July 2017, the company raised another $5.8 million in funding and announced their expansion into the Philadelphia and San Francisco-area sports markets. The Athletic expanded into Minnesota and the rest of Canada in September 2017. In February 2018, The Athletic announced further expansion into three new cities--New York, Dallas, and Cincinnati--bringing the total count to 18 cities with in-depth coverage. Soon thereafter, the site launched baseball-only coverage in Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Arizona, and Kansas City.
In March 2018, the company announced a $20 million third round of funding led by Evolution Media. Mather reported that this money would be invested into expanding coverage to new cities and increasing the number of writers from the current staff of 120. That same month, the site expanded baseball coverage to Seattle and hockey coverage to Tampa Bay, and announced full coverage in Denver and Boston starting in April. In Denver, The Athletic hired several reporters from The Denver Post. In Boston, the initial staff consisted of beat writers previously employed at the Boston Globe, Boston Herald and the Springfield Republican's web portal MassLive. Adding to college football coverage, The Athletic added dedicated beat writers for major programs like Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. In June 2018, The Athletic expanded into Buffalo, New York by hiring several reporters who had been bought out from The Buffalo News the same month; the Buffalo launch proved to be one of the most successful launches, with subscription numbers on par with those in Boston and New York, located in much larger metropolitan areas.
Maps The Athletic
Staff
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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