‘Tell people things they don’t know’: The Athletic’s Laura Williamson on journalism worth paying for
By Joanna Cummings
If your readers already know the score, watched the match and spent the evening dissecting it on WhatsApp, what will persuade them to pay you for more? It is a question Laura Williamson, Editor-in-Chief of The Athletic, comes back to repeatedly.
“If you’re an Everton fan, just by the nature of fandom now, you will be very knowledgeable,” says Williamson, Editor-in-Chief of The Athletic. “You will watch every game. You’ll be in chat groups, whether organised or with your mates on WhatsApp. You will have opinions about what you’re seeing.”
So the question becomes: what can the journalism add?
“The phrase I always use – and I probably bore my reporters stupid – is it’s our job to tell people things they don’t know about whatever it is they care about in terms of sport.”
That might come, she says, from a conversation at a training ground, a cultivated source or a reporter spotting the question everyone else has missed. But getting it requires investment: in reporters, in relationships and in the time to do the work.
What makes people pay?
The recent FIFA Men’s World Cup provided a useful test. The Athletic broke a string of stories, including three world exclusives during the tournament, including the news that a red card for US forward Folarin Balogun had been overturned by FIFA. This became the biggest story the publication had ever published.
“They were the real cut-throughs because people literally couldn’t get that information anywhere else,” says Williamson.
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She credits the reporters, but also the investment behind them. “They’d had time to cultivate sources that you just don’t get from turning up to press conferences every week.”
That principle extends beyond scoops.
“We do briefings, we call them, on the whistle of every game,” she says. “But it wasn’t Argentina three, whoever two. It was: should Messi have been sent off? Was this a red card?”
The point is to add something rather than repeat what a fan already knows. “I always try and move the conversation on to be a real point of difference.”
But distinctive journalism alone does not create a subscription habit. Laura points to the contrast between The Athletic’s coverage of the 2022 men’s World Cup and its most recent tournament.
“Our audience figures were phenomenal in 2022, but our subscribers basically went on holiday for a month because they didn’t know that they were going to get this from The Athletic,” Williamson says. “Whereas this time our subscribers came along for the ride.”
The challenge is not simply attracting a large audience around a big event, but teaching existing and potential subscribers what they can reliably come to you for: “It’s that habit, I think, that is absolutely crucial.”
Know who you’re serving
Building that habit becomes more complicated when the same story can be reaching very different readers.
The Athletic is US-owned, part of The New York Times bundle and covering sports with global audiences. During the World Cup, its editors thought about readers in three broad groups: the “interested,” who might be relatively new to football; the “fascinated,” who had more knowledge but wanted to find out more; and the “obsessed,” who could reel off the starting 11 and wanted detailed tactical analysis.
“We were very clear about thinking: who are we writing for, and also what’s the best format?” Williamson says. “Is it a 30-second video or a minute, or a news story or a more in-depth feature? Let’s think why we’re doing this specific type of thing.”
Those decisions draw on data, an audience research team that speaks to subscribers and non-subscribers, editorial experience and experimentation. “That’s what I loved about The Athletic, and why I joined it,” Williamson says. “We’ll just try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll pivot. We don’t just do this because this is how we’ve been working for 20 years.”
But reaching an international audience does not mean flattening out the local knowledge that gives the journalism its authority.
“If we’re covering the Premier League, we’re the ones here on the ground and we’ve got to bring that authenticity to what we do,” she says. “We won’t use dollars in headlines when it’s definitely pounds per week that footballers earn. We’ll say Hull City play in black and amber and not orange.”
Invest in what others can’t replicate
That on-the-ground expertise matters in an increasingly crowded sports media market. Alongside other publishers and broadcasters, The Athletic is competing for attention with podcasts, creators, former players, clubs’ own media operations and AI-generated information.
Williamson thinks professional sports journalism can sometimes underestimate its hand. “I think sometimes sports journalists have thought, ‘Well, I can’t compete with that. I never played for England. How do I get to opine like that?’”
But a former player’s expertise and a reporter’s serve different purposes.
“You might have played for England and absolutely your opinion is totally valid. But you can’t write a news story. You’re not going to break the news.”
Williamson is similarly pragmatic about creators: The Athletic has worked with external influencers to discuss its stories with their audiences. Clubs, too, can produce excellent content. The distinction is not that professional publishers are the only people capable of making something worth watching or reading.
It is what independent reporters can find out. Clubs “will only give you what they want to give you,” Williamson points out.
Creators may have huge audiences and compelling opinions, but The Athletic can put reporters at training grounds, matches and tournaments, build sources and uncover information unavailable to everyone else.
That, she believes, becomes more valuable as AI makes existing information easier to reproduce: “I do think that information that can’t just be generated is our huge opportunity.”
It is also why she wants the journalists themselves to be increasingly visible: “I want people to see our reporters out and about at these places,” she says.
“These are real people. We’re there and we’re actually having these conversations with people.”
The people behind the reporting
For Williamson, that investment is not limited to star names.
She points to The Athletic’s Talent ID scheme as one of the things she is proudest of, alongside internships designed to bring different kinds of journalists into the newsroom.
“I’m not bothered about a red-brick university, first-class degree,” she says. “I’d rather hire people who have charisma and ambition and, basically, that I’d like to go for a coffee with, because they’re the people who are going to get the information that will help us long term.”
Several journalists identified through its talent initiatives have subsequently secured full-time roles, she says, bringing skills across reporting, video and podcasts. “They get information. People trust them. And that’s just journalism, isn’t it?”
It returns to the broader point. Williamson talks about The Athletic investing in established talent too, including journalists such as football correspondent David Ornstein – but argues that talent needs the conditions to do the work.
“They couldn’t do what they do if they’re being expected to churn out stuff left, right and centre,” she says.
Instead, she describes “creative space”, backed by strong editing that keeps asking the reporter to go further: “I want to find out about this. Go find the answer.”
From journalism to habit to belonging
The end goal is not simply to produce stories worth paying for; it is to build a relationship strong enough that subscribers keep coming back. Laura describes The Athletic’s approach as “getting the cut-through with that news and trust and analysis and explanation, following it up with building a habit, and having a bit of fun too!”
Increasingly, that means thinking about the experience around the journalism too: live coverage where subscribers can talk to writers and experts during games, video that brings reporters closer to audiences, and more interactive team feeds combining different types of coverage.
It taps into something sport already has in abundance: community.
“Live sport is one of the few things now where people do come together,” Williamson says. “Monday night, if your team’s playing, you can’t watch it on record. You have to be there and you have to live it.”
One subscriber inadvertently gave her a description of where she wants that relationship to end up.
“One of my writers once said somebody contacted her and she hadn’t said, ‘I’m an Athletic subscriber.’ She said, ‘I’m part of The Athletic club.’ I just loved that. That’s what I want to get to eventually.”
That sense of belonging ultimately depends on trust, and for Williamson, trust starts with the reporting.
“The way you do that is through the hardest bit of all of it, which is contacts and building contacts and nurturing them,” she says. “That’s the best reporters I’ve worked with. That’s the ability that they have that sets them apart.”
This article originally appeared on our FIPP Congress website.
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