New York Times makes Athletic leap for subscribers

It is not often that a journalism start-up sells for as much as $550 million (€487 million), but that’s how much the New York Times Company has shelled out for The Athletic, a loss-making digital sports news publication with about 1.2 million subscribers.

Talks between the two companies broke down last year because The Athletic thought the sum offered by the NYT was too low, but a formal bidding process then reportedly helped lift the price. Well played, The Athletic.

No, the amount fetched is not much more than half a Politico – the politics-centred media outlet that was sold by its US owner to German giant Axel Springer for more than $1 billion last October – but it is still an outsized figure.

Quite whether this deal, or indeed the Politico one, signals the ushering in of a golden age for new media properties is another thing. The one firm conclusion that can be drawn from it is that the New York Times Company, like a Premier League club chasing that one elusive top-name manager who can apparently sprinkle magic gold dust all over the pitch, ultimately wanted The Athletic a lot.

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The NYT had an impressive 8.4 million print and digital subscribers at the last count and, before the Athletic deal, a target to reach 10 million by 2025. Meredith Kopit Levien, its chief executive since 2020, says that goal is now "meaningfully larger than 10 million subscriptions", given there is only "modest overlap" between its subscriber base and that of The Athletic.

Content investment

Not every digital media company will be capable of making a similar leap from exciting upstart to glorious pay-day exit, shrugging off the losses racked up in the meantime. The lesson of The Athletic, founded by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, is that it is possible to raise finance like a Silicon Valley app and then actually invest more – not less – in the talent producing your content than the old-school newspaper competition you are trying to disrupt.

When US sports fans, from 2016 on, and later supporters of English Premier League teams saw their favourite newspaper writers poached by The Athletic, they followed those journalists to the new product, encouraged by discounted subscription offers.

With The Athletic team now on its bench, the NYT can bundle the sports product with its own and use a strengthened squad to further extend its global ambitions. Both sides should be happy with this result. But the industry consolidation it represents won’t be cheered by everyone.