The Athletic will debut its most ambitious video series yet next week with the premiere of The Athletic LIVE, an interactive digital show that combines multiple popular YouTube formats and is hosted by Athletic staff as well as outside contributors from the content creator ecosystem.
From The Athletic side, newly hired NFL analyst Charles McDonald and national reporter Daniel Popper will work as recurring hosts alongside NBA analyst Zach Harper. They will be flanked by popular content creators including former USC quarterback Max Browne and longtime SB Nation personality Kofie Yeboah.
The AthleticLIVE, which launches Sept. 8, will vacillate between breaking news reactions, discussion and analysis, and game watchalongs. To start, the show’s Sunday and Monday episodes will air opposite Sunday and Monday-night NFL games, before expanding to five episodes per week around the start of the NBA season.
“The transition that we’ve been trying to engineer is moving from this idea of, ‘We’re making an audio podcast,’ or, ‘We’re making a social video series,’ and moving toward building communities that people want to be a part of,” The Athletic’s global head of series, Jesse Burton, told Awful Announcing. “So talent-led, community-driven franchises that span media.”
“Live is really sort of the last place that we’re unlocking.”
The show will be heavy on audience engagement, with the audience chat operating as an additional host. Burton said producers will even allow the chat to program the show in real time, with viewers selecting topics while also weighing in with their own thoughts. The popularity of YouTube and Twitch is a testament to the audience’s desire to engage directly with their favorite content, a concept The Athletic clearly embraces but which Burton acknowledged was “riskier” than a more straightforward talk show or reported narrative podcast.
Through past projects including the company’s FIFA World Cup watchalongs and several successful video podcasts, The Athletic has developed a proof of concept for turning its audience into live viewers — and its journalists into video hosts.
The sports outlet is undergoing this transition alongside its parent, The New York Times, which has launched several “show” brands and is seen as looking to scale up to compete with cable news. Journalists hired to work for either outlet are now expected to work across multiple media and build an audience.
“We’re investing in talent that will be excellent in all those spaces, but I do think we have some signals that these things are not mutually exclusive,” Burton said.
At The Athletic, multiple video shows have become major hits. One is Pablo Torre Finds Out, the breakout investigative series that The Athletic licenses and which earned it its first Pulitzer Prize. Another is Talk of the Devils, a Manchester United-focused show produced out of the soccer-loving English city.
Burton believes their formulas are replicable.
“We have immense amounts of entertainment talent inside of our newsroom that we have yet to fully tap,” he said.
To launch The Athletic LIVE, the company hired five full-time staffers to run the show out of a new northern Los Angeles studio. Several other freelance workers will also help on the show, which Burton said is “good to go for a while” thanks to a presenting sponsorship from Google Gemini.
Former ESPN writer-turned-YouTube star Joon Lee will also contribute weekly pre-recorded segments breaking down a big idea or trend in sports. Burton said he expects new personalities to join the show’s regular cast as the sports calendar dictates.
As the company expands its video output, The Athletic LIVE is merely one arm of that effort. The Athletic will continue to license outside shows, Burton said, as it did with Torre’s show and the recently departed Sports Gossip Show. Also airing Sept. 8 is the Season 2 premiere of The Athletic Show, a weekly offering the company produces for Amazon’s streaming service. The new season received an expanded 35-episode order through the end of the NBA season.
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