This subject has rattling around in my brain for a few days now as two of my favorite Timberwolves writers have moved from the AP and the MinnPost respectively to working for The Athletic. Since that happened, they barely post on Twitter and all of their observations are behind a paywall. I am not inherently against paying for news as I have two digital newspaper subscriptions, but something about their ideas and business practices really rubs me the wrong way. They've basically taken the ESPN Insider model and applied it to local sports, with the intent to put the Star Tribune out of business.

As they told the New York Times:
“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.”

Has The Athletic started to encroach on your local sports team's coverage yet? Would you subscribe if they did?

I did consider that I should buy an Athletic subscription because I think Britt Robson is one of the most insightful basketball writers we've got, but I think that statements like this are really gross and don't want to support that kind of Silicon Valley people don't matter mindset.
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