Athletic, Axios talking merger?

Sports-Media Outlet the Athletic Shifts Its Search for Merger Partner

This kind of move would make more sense to me.

 

The Athletic’s potential sale talks with NYT reportedly no more.

 

I hope this turns out well. At the moment it seems very concerning, and it’d piss me off to see The Athletic fall apart.

 

That's not likely to happen. Sport news sells.

 

Venture capitalists usually want to make their money back in three to five years, either through a sale or because the business has turned profitable. Based on the wording of the tweets above, it appears as if The Athletic is desperately trying to satisfy those venture capitalists. Wish the best to all of our friends there.

 

According to The Wall Street Journal story The Athletic has more than one million paying subscribers.

More from the story:

The Athletic doesn’t disclose detailed financial results, including whether it is profitable. The company generated about $80 million in revenue in 2020, according to a person familiar with the matter. It raised $55 million in January 2020 and has significant expenses, according to people familiar with the matter, including more than 600 employees, many of them top-tier reporters recruited from other news organizations.

 

This is bang-on. One good example of this is the St. Louis Blues, circa 2006-2011. They were bought by former Madison Square Garden suit Dave Checketts. But the money came from some private equity funds. Checketts, IIRC, hoped to make enough money to pay off the vulture funds. But he was cash-poor and five years later wasn't even close to paying off the fund guys. The team went up for sale and was eventually bought by local rich guy Tom Stillman and a group of similar types.

 

But I thought they were altruistically trying to save sports media.

Like everyone else here, I'm hoping for a soft landing for everyone in the trenches. But this is going to end as badly as every other saving grace has ended since 2000.

 

What was the alternative though? Stay at their newspapers and watch it all die anyway, except in this version writing eight-inch second-day gamers? If your profession is doomed either way, go down swinging with your best work.

 

The Athletic hired a lot of folks - perhaps all of its national writers - from more than the 8-inch gamer world of newspapers. It was a landing spot when ESPN made of its cuts. And The Athletic hired some out of college, too.

The original idea for The Athletic - a collection of local sites featuring the best (and reputedly different, even though it wasn't) coverage, was interesting. It quickly became about 10-15 headliner names who were - did they drive subscriptions? No idea. But the focus shifted away from winning subscription wars in local markets to "what did Shams say on Twitter?"

 

Different people use it for different things I suppose. I originally got it on a whim when they were running a Black Friday sale. But it was valuable enough to me that I renewed last November at a not inconsiderable markup.

Even though Aaron Suttles isn’t my favorite reporter on the Alabama beat, he puts out plenty of stories and covers the team thoroughly, and doesn’t repeat the angles I see from al.com. For the Preds and Titans, I get way better coverage than from the Tennessean (and from their old writers too, which lets me know it was the paper holding them back.) The national college football and basketball coverage is comprehensive too. And once every two or three weeks I see a story outside my usual interests that absolutely blows me away with how well done it is. I’m a satisfied customer.