NYT to Buy Sports Media Startup The Athletic for $550M

The New York Times will buy The Athletic in an all-cash deal to value the sports media startup at $550 million, per a Thursday (Jan. 6) report from Axios.

The Athletic has been looking for a deal for months now, and had previously been looking to sell because of how much cash it’s lost in the last few years. The Athletic will be a subsidiary of The Times and will operate separately.

According to the NYT, The Athletic is likely to be “immediately accretive” to the paper’s growth rate for revenue. That said, the acquisition is likely to be dilutive to the NYT’s profit for the next few years while subscription scales and the ad business is built.

The Athletic, founded six years ago, has hired “hundreds” of journalists across the U.S. and U.K. to produce long-form sports journalism, and has recently been experimenting with advertising and investing more in podcasts.

The Athletic did lay off staffers during the early parts of the pandemic, but has been hiring since. Now, it has around 600 full-time employees, which includes around 400 editorial staffers.

“Strategically, we believe this acquisition will accelerate our ability to scale and deepen subscriber relationships,” Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of the NYT, said in a statement announcing the deal.

According to the NYT, it wants to reach around 10 million paid digital-only subscribers by 2025, and expects to do so ahead of schedule with The Athletic as part of its portfolio.

In other news related to journalism, PYMNTS reported in the fall the Chinese government has been cracking down on financial journalists and commentators not registered with the government.

Read more: WeChat, Chinese Social Media to Pare Content That ‘Bad Mouths’ Chinese Economy

The government’s move, according to the Global Times, is that there needs to be punishment for self-media accounts “distorting” Chinese financial policies and macroeconomic data, badmouthing the financial market, spreading rumors, hyping speculation and more.