The Athletic is a subscription-based sports website covering professional and college teams in Chicago, Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Minnesota, Montreal, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco. The site also covers national stories in football, basketball, and hockey through a mix of long-form journalism, original reporting, and podcasts. Their business model is predicated on dis-aggregating the sports section of local newspapers and reaching non-local fans that are not reached by a local newspaper.