The Athletic Fails To Get NY Times To Buy After Potential Axios Merger Falls Flat

Sports subscription site The Athletic will have to continue its quest to find a business partner or outright buyer after talks with the New York Times and Axios went nowhere, as first relayed by Bloomberg News.

The Bloomberg report followed one earlier Thursday from The Wall Street journal, which indicated that The Athletic's merger talks fizzled, leading The Athletic to shift its attention to an outright sale to the Times.

Sources told OutKick late last month that The Athletic has been struggling to pick up renewals, the lifeblood of the site, which has no advertisements. One investor told OutKick he feared a "major shakeup in operations" if a business partner or buyer wasn't located soon.

OutKick sources confirmed reports that The Athletic recently held merger talks with Axios, but wouldn't go into detail about the state of those talks. The Wall Street Journal reported those talks are now dead, resulting in The Athletic pinning its hopes on a sale to the Times.

But Bloomberg followed by reporting that talks between The Athletic and Times "didn't get very far."

Several industry sources told OutKick that The Athletic has undergone a hiring freeze while it seeks a merger, though an editor from one of The Athletic's localized sites said that those sources aren't "entirely accurate."

Instead, there has been no edict about hiring -- though the editor did admit that adding writers and editors is "discouraged" at the present time.

The Athletic has refused to disclose whether it is profitable, though when one investor was asked by OutKick on Thursday, he responded in a text, "Come on. I think you know the answer to that."

Co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann launched The Athletic in 2016 as an ad-free website that generates its entire revenue from subscriptions and renewals. It offers both local and national sports coverage.

In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mather boldly predicted that The Athletic would steal top talent from struggling daily newspaper sports sections — comments that drew the ire of many of those in the industry.

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

But a source familiar with The Athletic's financials told OutKick that the future isn't nearly that certain.

“The majority of their cash flow is the result of investors, and at some point, you need to answer to them,” the source said. "They don't have the funds to do that at the moment. They need (a merger)."