Nearly 10 months after the N.Y. Times purchased The Athletic, the question of what the sports website “will become as it is integrated into the Times, remains largely unanswered,” according to Ben Strauss of the WASHINGTON POST. The Times “wants the Athletic to be profitable in three years,” but it is "losing money" now: $6.8M in February and March of this year and another $12.6M in the second quarter. Athletic Publisher David Perpich’s first order of business is to “integrate the Athletic into the Times bundle.” Recently, the company began “allowing Times log-in credentials to be used for the Athletic." The Times would like to “get the Athletic in front of more people.” To that end, it has “done some management shuffling," and the Athletic "announced a big expansion” of the ad sales business this month. The Times also has “started to promote the Athletic on its homepage and in its Twitter feed.” Sources indicated that this has “sapped morale among the sports department" at the Times. Sports staffers have had "meetings with higher-ups at the Times," including Perpich and NYT Exec Editor Joe Kahn, “asking questions about how work is promoted and how and whether they are supposed to compete with the Athletic on stories.” Times staffers said that their sports staffers have also “asked repeated questions about standards at the Athletic.” When the Athletic was sold, the cash “trickled down to every writer at the site.” Each “received at least $5,000,” while those with the “largest equity stakes received upward" of $1M (WASHINGTON POST, 10/7).
