Online sports publication has bold plan

THE ATHLETIC

sports section of the newspaper for $5 a month instead of the whole thing for $10,” he said. The challenge for the Athletic, he said, is in convincing readers that it’s making something good enough to justify the price tag.

The company launched in Chicago in 2016 on the hunch that it was finally the year for the Cubs. That was the right call — the team won the World Series for the first time since 1908. The Athletic’s founders spent a stretch of the season taking part in Y Combinator, the prestigious incubator for tech startups. Still, it took about eight months to get 1,000 subscribers for its Chicago coverage.

The Athletic set up operations in Toronto late last year, where it found its most fertile audience among Maple Leafs fans. The company says the city is its most successful market, with over 10,000 subscribers. It’s also the only city where it turns a profit.

When it launched in Cleveland earlier this year, it poached one of the most wellknown local writers covering the Cleveland Cavaliers, and got 1,000 subscribers within 48 hours.

The Athletic’s business strategy is reflected in its product design. The leading online sports journalism operations are built on advertising, meaning they need to attract as many readers as possible, then present them with the maximum amount of clickable content. The prevailing esthetic is the visual equivalent of a sports talk radio host screaming things at you.

The Athletic, by contrast, is a serene affair. Subscribers select teams they are interested in, and see news about only those teams. They get access to all the content, but the Athletic doesn’t expect a reader in Toronto to spend a lot of time diving into analysis of Chicago White Sox pitchers. Its editorial focus is on analysis rather than breaking news, and posts only a few articles for each city every day.

Courtside Ventures, which led a $2.6-million investment round in the Athletic in January, also led this round. The Chernin Group, Luminari Capital, Advancit, BDMI, and Y Combinator also participated. The Athletic plans to triple its editorial staff to 75 and launch in three to four cities by the end of the year, including San Francisco and Philadelphia.

But it is also diving deeply into the NHL, by launching hockey coverage in the other six Canadian cities with teams in the league, and beginning to cover NCAA football and basketball. Paul Fichtenbaum, the former editor-in-chief of the Sports Illustrated Group, is coming on full-time to serve as chief content officer.

Mike Kerns of the Chernin Group says that it’s been looking to invest increasingly in subscription media businesses. He used to work at Yahoo Inc., and says local sports coverage inspired unusual loyalty among readers.

“We knew from our experience it was an insatiable and increasingly underserved market,” he said. “Everybody lives somewhere.”