I was not as down on The Athletic. I was one of the few of my generation who still grew up on sports sections, so I appreciated their aim of creating an online sports section. I was raised on Bob Verdi and Steve Rosenbloom in the Chicago Tribune. I didn't have many friends. I think there was something about what the Athletic was trying to do that bugged me in my childhood.
It is difficult to know if stripping newspapers of talent helped lead to the downsizing or the closing of publications, because there are people who bought papers for the sports sections. A lot of papers stopped doing sports sections a long time ago because The Athletic provided one for everyone. It gave jobs to some talented people to keep doing what they do, and full disclosure, to a fair amount of my friends. They did not limit their writers or scope, which may have been part of the problem.
The New York Times bought The Athletic yesterday, but it is not known what that will mean in the long term. It is hard to imagine that the shape will not change at some point soon, and the use of the term "at this time" from the letter from the founders is ominous. Everyone is saying the right thing at the moment. It feels like they are doing it through smiles. My friend Sean put it that way.
It is the place where The Athletic got ridiculed for its Ponzi scheme, and it is also where the important stories of the day were broken. It was where Meg Linehan blew the cover off the mess that was taking place in the NWSL. It is where writers got paid to do what they do, which is something that isn't all that prevalent these days. Maybe most of us didn't need 17 observations from a hockey game. The Athletic provided it to people who did. slideshows and clickbait are rarely used these days.
The Athletic tried to stand out from newspapers by robbing sports sections people wanted, and now they have been bought by The Times. I suppose we all become what we dislike. The Athletic has overreached, overpromised, and now is at the mercy of a better moneyed entity.
