Seven years ago, I had some people tell me I was crazy to leave a management role with a growing start-up operation to become a beat writer at a newspaper.

Seven years later, I have heard the same thing about going in the other direction.

The reality about this business, the media business, right now is that no one truly knows where it is going. It’s changing so rapidly that the path forward, from both a revenue and a content perspective, is unclear. But here is what I like about The Athletic.

We are taking the sports section out of the newspaper. We are making it the focus, making it entirely digital, with a great app, and freeing it from word lengths and deadlines. We are fully credentialed with every major team and hiring young (with a veteran or two). We want to do things differently and tell stories others are not.

The great thing about being a truly subscriber-driven site is we will not be reliant on traffic or click-bait to make money. We will never dumb our content down or speak down to our audience. Our audience is why we do this.

We are also fully independent from the teams and leagues, which is harder and harder to find these days. We are led by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, two California-based start-up experts who have raised considerable venture capital to get us going, first in Chicago and now Toronto.

(Alex is a Flyers fan from Philadelphia who still talks about Mikael Renberg and the Legion of Doom. Adam is from Cincinnati and admits he mostly knows the NHL from video games. His favourite player? Sandis Ozolinsh.)

The Athletic’s plan in 2017 is to enter more U.S. markets, part of a slow growth process that will potentially take us into dozens of cities in the next few years. If you subscribe, you will get access to every site, which will hopefully mean hundreds of writers down the road.

To get there, we need your help. We need support so that great writers like Sean Fitz-Gerald, John Lott, Eric Koreen, Sean McIndoe and many others who have lost their jobs in recent years stay in this industry producing great content for a decent salary. We need support so that when more layoffs and buyouts come at the papers, we can hire the best of those who are let go.

We need to try a different business model because the old one isn’t working. I don’t know if we’ll get a better chance to do so.

We are not done adding to our roster at The Athletic. We will be hiring a Blue Jays writer in the coming months, as well as several columnists unique to Toronto. We would like, for example, to have former NHL, NBA and MLB players, coaches and executives contribute.

If there is someone you would like to see us hire, please let me know.

We will also begin to host events that are free for subscribers, with the first scheduled for mid-January. I hope to meet some of you there.

If you’ve signed up already, thank you – and spread the word. If you want to wait and see, we’ll do our best to win you over eventually. And I’ll point out that we’re having a sale right here.

On that note, I’m going to head to the rink and start writing. Thanks as always for reading.