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The Times & The Athletic Are Getting Hot and Heavy

The Athletic has now entered into exclusive talks with The New York Times about a sale. Here’s the logic.

New York Times
Photo by Gary Hershorn/Corbis via Getty Images
Dylan Byers
December 17, 2021

I first heard about The Athletic some four years ago from Apple executive and Golden State Warriors and Duke megafan Eddy Cue, and I was immediately enchanted by the founders’ vision. Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, who had met while working on the performance sports app Strava, seemed to intuitively understand what local newspaper executives had long realized: that sports fans were a sticky and insatiable audience, eager to read anything written about their favorite teams, even if that meant three articles about a game they’d already watched or a free-agency pursuit that was never going to materialize.