You should not pitch The Athletic. Nobody should. The Athletic is not a single editor with an inbox; it is a newsroom of more than 500 journalists, and the brand name on the masthead has never read a pitch in its life. The people who read pitches are the Packers beat writer, the Premier League reporter in Manchester, the college football national writer, the WNBA staffer. Pitch the publication and you get silence. Pitch the right person on the right beat and you get a phone call.
That shift is the whole answer to how to pitch The Athletic. Most PR teams treat it like a magazine: find a generic contact, attach a press release, wait. The Athletic is built the other way around, team by team and league by league, and its writers judge pitches by one question above all: does this matter to the fans who pay to read me?
What The Athletic covers and how it is built
Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann launched The Athletic in 2016 as a subscription sports site with no display advertising, and the founding bet was simple: fans will pay for deep, local coverage of the teams they love. The company hired beat writers away from shrinking metro papers and built city by city. By the time The New York Times agreed to buy it for $550 million in cash in January 2022, The Athletic had about 1.2 million subscribers. The deal closed on February 1, 2022.
The Times then went further. On July 10, 2023, it announced it was disbanding its own sports department of more than 35 people and would rely on The Athletic for sports coverage across its homepage, newsletters, and print section. For anyone pitching, that matters. A story that runs on The Athletic can now surface in New York Times sports placements too.
By February 2026, according to Axios, The Athletic described itself as the world’s largest sports newsroom: more than 500 journalists, more than 100 stories a day on average, more than 30 podcasts, and 11 newsletters reaching over 10 million people. Steven Ginsberg, who joined from The Washington Post in 2023, is executive editor. That same month it hired six laid-off Post sports journalists, including Barry Svrluga for the Commanders beat and Adam Kilgore for a new rapid response investigative unit.
The newsroom has three layers you can pitch. The first is team beat writers, who cover one franchise or program and file almost every day. The second is league and sport writers, who cover the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college sports, soccer, golf, tennis, and women’s sports at a national level. The third is national columnists, investigative reporters, and the podcast and newsletter teams. Each layer wants something different, and a pitch built for one layer usually fails with the other two.
Why do most pitches to The Athletic die?
They die because they are aimed at the brand instead of the beat. Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2026 report found that 88% of journalists delete pitches that fall outside their beat. At a general news outlet, “outside the beat” might mean sending a tech story to a health reporter. At The Athletic, it can mean sending a Cubs story to the White Sox writer. The beats are that narrow, and the writers protect them.
The second reason is the newsroom’s own strategy. In June 2023, The Athletic laid off nearly 20 people and moved more than 20 reporters off their team beats into regional or general assignment roles. The internal memo, as reported by Awful Announcing, said the company would keep more than 100 team beat writers but would stop treating every league the same. It cut some NHL and MLB team beats, kept NFL and Premier League staffing largely intact, and said it wanted more stories that “resonate with fans across an entire league.”
Read that sentence as a pitch brief for how to pitch The Athletic today. A story that matters to one fan base is good. One that also tells the rest of the league something new is better. Your opening two lines have to show at least the first.
The third reason is format. Athletic writers do not run press releases; they write reported stories and analysis in their own voice. If your email reads like wire copy, the writer assumes you sent it to fifty people.
If you are new to pitching sports outlets in general, our breakdown of how to get featured in sports media covers the wider field. The rest of this piece is specific to The Athletic.
The beat reporters in the press box are your real audience
Picture a Cubs beat writer at Wrigley Field in late August. They arrived by mid afternoon for clubhouse access, they are filing a game story and a notebook, and they have read every press release the team sent this season. What they do not have is a story nobody else in the press box has.
That is what you are offering, or you are offering nothing. Beat writers at The Athletic compete against the local paper, the team’s own media channels, the league’s site, and a dozen independent newsletters and podcasts. Their edge is access and depth. A pitch earns attention when it adds to one of those two things: a source they cannot reach, data they cannot get, or a person whose story explains something about the team that the daily grind does not.
What does that look like in practice? A youth baseball nonprofit on the North Side whose alumni now include two players in the Cubs system is a story for the Cubs writer. A sports science company whose tracking data shows something specific about a pitcher’s workload is a story for the writer who covers that staff, or for the MLB analytics writer if the finding applies across the league. A former player opening a business is usually a local news story, unless it connects to something happening with the team right now.
Beat writers also work on rhythm. NFL writers live on a Sunday game cycle, NBA and NHL writers file around a dense schedule, and college football writers spike in August and again in recruiting windows. Pitch during the gaps: an MLB writer has more room on an off day than on the night of a walk-off win.
Beat writers are also wary of anything that looks like a team-sanctioned puff piece. If your client is a team sponsor, say so in the first line. Hiding it ends the relationship.
Run the BEAT Test before you write a word
Here is the filter we use before any pitch goes to The Athletic. We call it the BEAT Test, and it has four questions. A pitch that cannot answer at least three of them with a clear yes should not be sent.
B is for Beat match. Can you name the single writer whose beat this story sits inside, and have you read their last five pieces? Not the section, the person. If two writers could own it, pick the one who has written about the closest topic in the past month, and do not send it to both at once.
E is for Exclusive value. What does the writer get that the team’s media relations staff, the local paper, and the league’s site cannot hand them? Acceptable answers include first access to a person, first look at a dataset, a document, or a reported angle you are giving them alone. “We sent a press release to everyone” is not exclusive value.
A is for Audience stake. Why would a paying fan of this team or league care? Not “this is interesting,” but “this changes how you understand the bullpen, the draft board, the coach’s decision, the club’s finances.” Muck Rack’s 2026 survey found 78% of journalists judge a pitch relevant when it affects their audience or community, and Athletic readers are the most specific audience in sports media.
T is for Travel. Does the story travel beyond one fan base? This is the test the June 2023 memo set: stories that “resonate with fans across an entire league.” A yes here moves a pitch from a team writer’s notebook item to a league-wide feature, and it opens the door to national writers and podcasts. A no is fine for a beat pitch, but you need yeses on the other three.
Scoring is blunt, and it is the core of how to pitch The Athletic without burning a contact. Four yeses and you have a strong pitch for a team writer with a shot at national pickup. Three yeses, with Travel as the missing one, means pitch the beat writer only. If Beat match or Exclusive value is the missing one, stop and rework the story, because those two are where most Athletic pitches fail.
How do you write the pitch email itself?
Short, specific, and in the writer’s language. Muck Rack’s 2026 report found journalists prefer individual email pitches under 200 words, sent before noon, with one timely follow-up. Every one applies here.
Your subject line should read like the headline the writer might write, not a marketing tagline. “Cubs prospect’s former coach on what changed in his delivery” is a subject line. “Exciting partnership announcement” is a delete.
Your first sentence names the team or league and the specific news. Your second sentence states what is exclusive and to whom. Your third sentence gives the Audience stake in fan terms. Then one or two lines of proof: a data point, a credential, a link to something the writer can verify in thirty seconds. Close with the access you can provide and the window: “She’s available Tuesday or Wednesday before the series opener.”
Reference their work with substance. “Loved your piece” is noise. “Your story last week on the bullpen usage spike made me think of this” shows you read it.
Attachments are a mistake on first contact. Put any release, images, or data in a link. If you have a press release, make sure it is written for sports media in the first place; our guide to the press release for sports covers how to structure one so a reporter can lift facts from it fast. The release is supporting material, never the pitch itself.
Follow up once, three to four business days later, in the same thread, with something new: an added detail, a fresh data point, a confirmed interview slot. If there is still no reply, move on. Quietly sending the same pitch to the next writer down the chain inside a week is the fastest way to get filtered out of the whole newsroom.
For the email mechanics that apply to any reporter, from subject lines to follow-up timing, see how to pitch journalists and get replies.
Know when to go national, and when to wait
Not every story belongs with the beat writer. Some belong further up, and some do not belong at The Athletic yet.
Go national when the story passes Travel with room to spare. Data that applies across a league, a trend affecting dozens of programs, a business story about how teams sell tickets or sponsorships, a health or science finding about athletes in general: those are for league writers, sport-wide writers, and in some cases the investigative team. The same BEAT Test applies, but your Beat match is now a national writer who covers that theme, not a team.
Podcasts and newsletters are a separate door. With more than 30 podcasts, The Athletic has hosts who need guests every week, and an expert with a sharp, specific take on a league topic can earn a booking even when there is no written story. Pitch the show’s producer or host with two or three precise talking points and a short clip of your guest on audio or video.
Wait when the story is not ready. If your client has no news, no data, no access, and no link to what fans are discussing this week, build the story elsewhere first: local outlets, trade publications, team-adjacent podcasts. A track record makes your next Athletic pitch easier, because the writer can search your client’s name and find something real.
Draft season, the trade deadline, free agency, and the playoffs stretch beat writers thin. Pitch inside those windows if your story is part of that news, and in the quiet weeks if it is not.
Your next step is concrete. Pick the one team or league your client has the most authentic connection to. Open The Athletic’s hub for that team, read every byline from the past 30 days, and write down the writer who owns the topic closest to your story. Run your idea through the BEAT Test on paper. If it scores three or four, write a pitch under 200 words, send it to that one writer before noon on a weekday that is not a game day, and set a reminder to follow up once, with something new, four business days later.