The New York Times owned site The Athletic has laid down some new rules for mixing politics and sports in their writing.
"We don’t want to stop people from having a voice," Chief Content Officer Paul Fichtenbaum told staff, according to OutKick. "But there comes a point where something that is a straightforward, 'Hey, I’m concerned about guns in America'... becomes political when you say, ‘I’m concerned about guns in America, and this political party is the reason why we’re having an issue.'"
Fichtenbaum instructed staff that social media should not be used to voice radical political opinions and that discipline would be the easiest way to prevent things from tipping over politically.
An anonymous disgruntled employee responded "What about Black Lives Matter? Is that a social cause? Who will write about athlete protests? What about trans athletes in sports?"
The reference was to the controversial insertion of progressive ideology in sports. Two examples of recent histrionic political saturation were a football coach being fined for daring to question the peacefulness of the 2020 BLM protests, and the phenomenon of biological men competing against women in sports.
But The Athletic, which had to be purchased due to its failure, had an all-in approach when it came to marrying politics and sports. They'd even had "affinity" groups comprised of queer staffers, black staffers, women staffers, and staffers who identify as being able to talk about mental illness.
The Athletic's contentiousness goes back to 2016 when it was launched by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann. It was an ad-free, subscription based site that threw down the gauntlet and declared they wanted to make "business 'extremely difficult for daily sports sections around the country.'"
Athletic co-founder Alex Mather even boasted that the site would "wait every local paper out and let the continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing." But according to Front Office Sports, the company's ad-free business model led to over $40 million in losses in 2020 and got a reputation for hemorrhaging cash while not covering the major sports teams they'd bragged about previously.
In January of 2022, The New York Times purchased the floundering site in a heated buyout of $550 million. For the Times it was a business move to effortlessly expand their subscription base.
But as OutKick reported, "It is hard to know how many subscribers The Athletic actually brought to the Times, as co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann have been notoriously vague (or outright dishonest) about those figures."
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