If you’re wondering what $7 million in VC funding and a whole lot of shit-talking the competition gets you, then head on over to The Athletic’s website to check out the future of sports journalism.

Don’t bother checking the URL, you’re on the correct website. The future of sports journalism looks exactly like the past, except you get to pay a subscription.

The New York Times clone is remarkable for only one thing, the lack of ads, which The Athletic believes will translate directly into high-quality articles. The website’s founder, Alex Mathers, told the Times, “the advertising business model does not align with quality.”

Mathers and co-founder Adam Hansmann bring their Silicon Valley arrogance to a highly saturated market, “Bleacher Report is empty calories. SB Nation is empty calories. The newspapers are doing nothing.” Insulting the competition while hiring the writers they lay-off (The Athletic has hired a 65 person editorial staff since launching in January 2016).

The main draw of The Athletic seems to be the categorization by team, city and sport, an interesting way to organize a website. The downside (or upside as they see it), is that you have to create enough content to fill all the categories, which means hiring a shit load of writers — especially if you expect high-quality content.

The Athletic’s decision to insult every other sports news outlet and journalist is incredibly short-sighted for several reasons. For starters, you want other news sites to link to your articles in their articles and to use your news as a source. The major news companies gain tons of readers from other news sites linking to their stories. Having a paywall makes it even harder for other journalists to link to your articles, thus hurting your own sites performance. Lastly, the majority of start-up news sites end up selling themselves to a larger publishing company (especially one that is burning money on writers as fast as The Athletic is…) — insulting every other publication may hurt their chances of being purchased.

Basically, Mather’s tactless comments will almost certainly backfire on The Athletic. They’ve insulted every single sports news outlet, from Deadspin to the local papers. They think everyone else is wasting their time on social media and click-bait articles, and they’ve got the answer to saving sports journalism. At an interview in San Fransisco, Mathers said,

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

Other news outlets are starting to take notice and they are less than thrilled by Mather’s comments. According to Deadspin,

These are rude things to say, and using the space allotted to you by a paper like the Times to call your competitors morons and openly wish for their demise (especially when you are new to the industry, as The Athletic’s founders are) is something an asshole would do. They’ve drawn a ton of criticism from reporters, observers, and subscribers, who (fairly) feel threatened by people who plainly present themselves as vultures picking over the carcasses of once-noble outlets.

Regardless, I don’t plan to ever read The Athletic or link to any of their content after reading their founder’s comments. While I’m also not a huge fan of the subscription model, I do find that some quality news sites, like The Economist, warrant a subscription. I find paywalls to be a very counter-intuitive decision for a news site, as it prevents your articles from being shared and read as much as possible.

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Why The Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers