Just over a year ago, I wrote a column wondering whether the New York Times’ purchase of sports outlet The Athletic would spell doom for the upstart site. I wasn’t confident at that point that the Times wouldn’t ruin my go-to site (and app) for solid coverage of the teams that I love.
I wrote:
Since the beginning of the year, the majority of the notifications I get from The Athletic app on my phone have centered on the New York Mets, particularly pitchers Jacob DeGrom and Max Scherzer. Anytime one of those two pitchers sneezes, I get a breaking alert.
At the same time, I have to dig for news about my Bulldogs or Braves — the reasons I signed up for The Athletic in the first place. It’s also abundantly clear that The Athletic is placing more emphasis on reporters and columnists who cover stories nationally instead of the quality local coverage that was its bread and butter at first.
Every major change involves growing pains, and I guess that’s what happened with the Times’ purchase of The Athletic. I’m not one of those people who won’t admit when he’s wrong, as much as it pains me to do so sometimes, so I’ll say that I was definitely wrong about The Athletic.
In the spring of 2022, I was considering canceling my subscription, and now I don’t think I could do without it. The Athletic has become essential for me as a sports fan.
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The Athletic has finally regained the balance between team-centric coverage and national headlines. Most of the coverage I see is about my Bulldogs, Braves, and my new favorite NFL team, the Philadelphia Eagles. At the same time, I do get enough notifications about what’s happening on the national level in college football and Major League Baseball, along with some human interest stories that catch my attention.
To put it as simply as possible, The Athletic’s coverage is better than any other outlet I’ve seen. Left-wing politics don’t creep into articles at The Athletic, unlike ESPN’s coverage. The Athletic’s thorough deep dives are fair and don’t mask an agenda; for example, The Athletic covered the speeding issues among University of Georgia football players without the tabloid tackiness that characterized the Atlanta Journal-Consitution’s reporting.
Another thing that I like about The Athletic over ESPN is that the former doesn’t obsess over certain teams and individuals (ahem, Deion Sanders and the University of Colorado) the way the latter does. Last year, I joked about seeing too many notifications about Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, but that’s not the case as much anymore. The Athletic is also experimenting with threads during games from my favorite teams; I haven’t participated in those, but I should.
Of course, one of the issues last year was that The Athletic wasn’t profitable; it was bleeding money. The Times forked over just over half a billion to buy the site, and at the time, I wasn’t alone in wondering if it was a wise decision. In hindsight, it must have been the right thing to do because the Times has shuttered its sports section and is relying on The Athletic to provide coverage.
Ethan Strauss reports at Spectator World about why the Times’ sports coverage failed, and it has much to do with the mindset of the mainstream media in general.
“The problem is, though, that the paper didn’t exactly attack sports with an eye towards the general interest of sports fans writ large, either,” Strauss writes. “Instead it generally wrote about dreary topics that bore many sports enthusiasts.”
“Concussions, doping, a women’s soccer team in Afghanistan, a tragic avalanche in Washington… worthy stories, but what does this have to do with the Mets?” he adds.
The mainstream media taking the most negative perspective on something fun? You don’t say. But it makes sense that the Times would abandon this take on sports when it has The Athletic and its compelling, thorough, and fan-centered coverage.
So yes, I was wrong about The Athletic. But I’m glad to be wrong in this case because the outlet has become essential to me as a sports fan and as a writer who sometimes covers issues relating to sports. If The Athletic keeps up this level of sports reporting, I’ll be a subscriber for a long time.
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