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The Athletic’s Twins beat writer, Aaron Gleeman, has opted to go independent rather than being reassigned at the New York Times-owned sports outlet.
Gleeman told Front Office Sports that The Athletic approached him in early April, shortly after the MLB regular season began, and asked him to pivot to a different role where he would be on news-desk shifts covering baseball from a national perspective. He said that he would have been able to continue covering the Twins, but it would have had to work around regular shifts focused on coverage elsewhere.
“I loved being at The Athletic,” Gleeman said. “I wanted to stay there. It was a dream job but the part of it that was the dream was covering the Twins. I’m a lifelong Minnesotan and I just decided to take a risk, monetarily-wise, and just say screw it. I’d rather take a risk doing something I’m good at and passionate about than keep a job just to stay there.”
A spokesperson for The Athletic declined to comment.
Prior to joining The Athletic in 2019, Gleeman was the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, and he covered MLB for NBC Sports before that.
Gleeman first started covering the Twins as a blogger about 20 years ago, under the domain AaronGleeman.com, and he is returning to the same URL for his subscription site. So far, the risk is paying off. Gleeman said his goal with the independent endeavor was to draw 1,000 paid subscriptions. He’s nearly accomplished that goal already, telling FOS he has “just under” 1,000 paying subscribers—in four hours since going live.
The site costs $8 per month (or $16 per month for a founding member tier, which includes extra perks such as VIP quarterly chats), or $75 per year.
Gleeman’s departure comes as The Athletic has somewhat pivoted its business model from the days of its founding, when it strived to have hyperlocal beat coverage across the country. “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” the outlet’s co-founder, Alex Mather, infamously told the NY Times (which ironically would go on to acquire the outlet) in 2017.
While there are still many hot-button teams and regions that have dedicated beat writers at The Athletic, a fair amount across various sports have been let go or reassigned since the Times’s purchase of the outlet in 2022. Last year, Wisconsin Badgers beat writer Jesse Temple chose a similar path to Gleeman, writing for the subscription outlet Badger Connect rather than getting reassigned to a cluster of covering several different college football teams. Brewers beat writer Will Sammon was reassigned to cover the Mets in 2022, and the Milwaukee beat was not back-filled.
As for the Twins, The Athletic will continue to cover the team with beat writer Dan Hayes.
