The CEO Of The Athletic Is Getting Crushed For Saying He Is Going To "Suck Every Local Paper Dry" In His New York Times Interview

NY TIMES – By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called The Athletic probably will have hired another well known sportswriter from your local newspaper. In a couple of years, once The Athletic has completed its breakneck expansion, perhaps that newspaper’s sports section will no longer exist.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic, said in an interview in San Francisco. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

“We are doing great work,” Mather said. “We treat our writers really well, we pay them well, and we are doing amazing journalism. If someone has a problem with that, that’s on them.”
Controversial comments from a CEO in the New York Times?  WE LIVE FOR THIS SHIT ON THE INTERNET.  So happy it’s another site with the negative headlines for a day.  Last week was great for our bottom line but it’s Monday and I’m a little drained, need a short break from fighting haters.

Anyway you know how I know I’m on this guy’s side?  Because I’m looking at everyone who is crapping on him on Twitter right now.  The usual whiny baby suspects.  The superior moral police.  The blue checkmark brigade.  Taking the other side is an automatic.   Seriously Twitter search “The Athletic” and play a game with yourself trying to pick out the most smug pithy retort.  You’ll end up with two dozen possibilities.

It’s so funny to watch how pretzel’ed they all are too.  The Athletic is the place that picked up all the great sportswriting talent laid off by the big companies like ESPN and Fox and SI etc etc.  A haven for “real sports reporting,” where people like Ken Rosenthal who were so unceremoniously let go can pick right back up and do what they’re best at without the corporate politics and algorithm strategies.  Now the people who lovveeeeed that so much have to reconcile it with the CEO being a cocky shit talker.  Something they VERY MUCH frown upon.  Seriously those quotes are like a slightly more corporate Dave Portnoy.  And guess what?  He’s just speaking the truth.  Or at least how he sees it.  That’s their business plan.  Suck up talent and watch their competition bleed out.  If you hate that so much then stop it.  Make him eat his words.  Welcome to capitalism.

Ok I will say completely objectively, wanting to stomp on traditional media…by hiring the guys who have defined traditional media for the past 10 years…is curious.

Also, his response-to-the-criticism game – needs improvement.

Blaming it on cold brews and posting pics of his dog.  That’s a guy who hasn’t been to battle on the internet before.

Note: The Chernin Group is an investor in The Athletic