Last week was an awful one for anyone that loves sportswriting. Or who knows any of those involved.

What ESPN did to its writing staff was extremely disappointing. It was a clear-cutting that had nothing to do with the work of those fired and everything to do with a company that has failed to adjust its business model to a rapidly shifting media climate.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t just. But that’s becoming routine.

I received a lot of snarky replies when I tweeted how awful this was for hockey coverage, losing those voices. What some of those readers miss is that while ESPN rarely broadcasts hockey these days, they nonetheless had invested in one of the best writing staffs covering the NHL in the United States.

Maybe even the best, given how comprehensive and unique their work was. All you had to do was be at some of the big league events and you could see how they invested manpower and money when most outlets were scaling back both year after year.

Pierre LeBrun is among the top two or three most connected people in the sport. Craig Custance (who was spared in the bloodbath) has gone from one of the best beat writers in the game (RIP Thrashers) to a puck polymath, someone who makes paying for ESPN Insider worth it just for his work. And Scott Burnside is one of the top NHL feature writers there is.

To toss them overboard, in the middle of the second round of the playoffs, with no warning, is… well it’s despicable. And unfortunately it’s a sign of the times in this business.

I’ve written on this theme before when explaining why we have a paywall at The Athletic. I can’t emphasize enough that this isn’t about letting folks go who deserve the axe. It’s huge macro factors at work, things like cord cutting and collapsing online ad rates.

And the free factor. Free content online, of varying levels of quality, has hurt job security for almost everyone in this business.

Credit: Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

Hockey coverage was hardly the only thing impacted by ESPN’s cuts. A lot of big names were let go: Jayson Stark and Ethan Strauss, Chad Ford, Ed Werder, Jane McManus and Andy Katz and nearly 100 others. Some of these people have half a million Twitter followers. They’re not without audience or without value. Just the opposite.

The problem is with companies trying to monetize that content – especially written content – and those audiences. They don’t know how.

ESPN is far from alone there. This isn’t just about cable networks getting squeezed.

In the U.S., three of the biggest local news companies – Tronc, Gannett and McClatchy – have had their market capitalizations drop by 58 per cent, 54 per cent and 85 per cent in the last five years, even as the stock market has soared. Here in Canada, both the Star and the entire Postmedia chain – which still employs most of the sportswriters in this country – are in deep trouble.

All of these companies are cutting staff. They’re often doing so nonsensically: laying off the Canadian sportswriter of the year and paying people like Cam Cole to go away. A lot of terrific sports coverage – the quality kind, that puts thoughtful writers in arenas and stadiums – is disappearing. Many of the press boxes I was in this year had a lot of empty seats.

This is why something like The Athletic exists. We’re trying to fill some of that void with quality content that’s not simply aimed at getting clicks. That’s why I left a newspaper after 12 years to take on the challenge of starting something new.

One of the frustrating things about Wednesday personally was all the messages we received to the company Twitter account along the lines of “oh now The Athletic can hire so-and-so,” again and again.

Trust me, we would love to give everyone a home. It would be an honour to work with a lot of those folks that were let go.

Here is the reality of where we are at in Toronto so far. We have five full-time staff, all on contracts. Associate editor Kaitlyn McGrath and managing editor Sean Fitz-Gerald help me keep the lights turned on and the copy posted. Dave Alter covers the Leafs, Eric Koreen covers the Raptors and Israel Fehr covers the Blue Jays.

We’re lucky, too, in that we have some really dedicated freelancers like John Lott, Tyler Dellow, Blake Murphy, Josh Kloke, Dom Luszczyszyn and others. But we’re a small crew.

The good news is, five months in, we are growing. Faster than we expected. Thousands of people have signed up and told their friends, keeping that growth steady (even with the Jays imploding early). But it’s going to take time for us to build up. It might take years.

The best-case scenario is that someone looks at what we’ve accomplished so far, sees the potential in it and invests in helping us grow the idea. Then we can push into more markets and add more talent and do some really exciting things.

Eventually, I think that is going to happen. Everything that’s happened so far this year has been positive. I’m optimistic we can help replace at least a few of the jobs created by all the layoffs at the newspapers and ESPN and elsewhere.

That said, we need more readers to get behind the idea, in this early stage, to help us get to the next one.

We truly appreciate those who are supporting us already, even though we’re a start-up going through some obvious growing pains. (Exhibit A: Some of the technical issues we’re ironing out with the app. If you’ve received notifications, consider yourself special 🦄.) I hope more people can buy into the idea that this is the beginning for us and that we’re going to put all of our subscription revenue into the product and expanding elsewhere, as soon as we can.

So try us out for a month. It’s about $6. (I’ll buy you a beer if we ever meet in a bar. Domestic only.) Download the app, browse around and give us your suggestions. The good thing is that you can cancel at any point – we make that really straightforward because we’re not evil. Hopefully you’ll like what we’re doing and won’t want to.

Here’s our latest deal that makes the price extremely reasonable. Thanks for reading.

— James