Clueless in New York (Times)

When The New York Times bought The Athletic early last year for $550 million, it was a great day for Athletic co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann and publications with "The" in the title. Mather and Hansmann made a boatload of money on their contrarian bet that people would be willing to pay to read great sports reporting and writing.

In a CNBC interview, Mather and Hansmann indicated they believed the Times provided The Athletic with a critically important top of funnel (The Athletic had been spending gobs of cash to acquire customers). They also believed The New York Times would help The Athletic grow more quickly and much larger than if Mather and Hansmann tried to do it on their own.

It was a bad bet. The New York Times does many things well -- including selling digital subscriptions to its news site. But what Mather and Hansmann didn't understand about The New York Times is that sports isn't in its DNA. It has no idea how to run a successful sports publication.

The New York Times is a distant third -- behind the New York Daily News and New York Post -- when it comes to sports coverage in Manhattan. It slides even further down the list when you include Long Island and New Jersey. One of the biggest reasons The New York Times struggles is because it likes to focus more on entertaining or investigative stories than the nuts-and-bolts coverage that most sports fans prefer.

The New York Times no longer has a standalone sports section. And earlier this month, it decided to close down its sports desk and publish stories from The Athletic in its place.

The Athletic has around 400 sports reporters -- including many that cover the New York sports scene. It was just a matter of time before the New York Times would try to gain operational efficiencies by publishing The Athletic's content in the newspaper. But even though tapping The Athletic for daily coverage and some features was both the correct business move and inevitable, The New York Times still managed to botch the transition.

The New York Times has some terrific sports reporters. Some have an incredible amount of expertise in one sport, like soccer reporter Rory Smith and baseball reporter Tyler Kepner. Others generate incredible investigative pieces like colleges fudging the numbers on gender equality in sports and the long-term repercussions of concussions for football players. But instead of freeing its reporters to skip the day-to-day grind and focus on features or investigative reports to supplement The Athletic's coverage, The New York Times reassigned its reporters to other desks in the newspaper. It's a colossal mistake.

Instead of blending the best of The New York Times with the best of The Athletic to create a sports section that could be worth reading, The New York Times exiled top talent to other desks -- and reportedly didn't tell some of the desks that the change was coming.

The bad instincts The New York Times showed in eliminating its sports desk were on display earlier this year when the company laid off about 4% of The Athletic's staff.

When The Athletic launched, it grew by focusing on hockey and baseball first. It understood that the mainstream media was cutting back on local sports coverage -- especially hockey and baseball. It also understood that hockey and baseball fans were willing to pay for granular coverage of their sport. Focusing on sports where fans were willing to pay for quality coverage allowed The Athletic to grow quickly.

Yet when The Athletic made its layoffs, it mostly cut baseball and hockey reporters and editors. Additionally, it was reported that The Athletic was moving away from local coverage to "leaguewide" stories.

The move shows a fundamental misunderstanding of The Athletic's value proposition. People subscribe to The Athletic because they want coverage of their team -- not their league.

The New York Times didn't buy The Athletic for $550 million dollars to compete on the New York sports scene or to turn it into yet another failed national sports publication. It wants The Athletic to become a top digital destination for sports content -- and highly profitable. But nothing The New York Times has done since acquiring The Athletic indicates that there's a sound plan to accomplish that moving forward.

The Athletic isn't profitable yet. And I'm not sure it will ever be profitable under the leadership of The New York Times.