Last month at the National Sports Card Convention in Chicago, creator Brandon Pereira, who posts as Coach Koe, met a kid named Dominic. Dominic had spent the summer washing garbage cans to earn money to come to the convention and buy cards for his collection. He and Coach Koe browsed the offerings at the convention and eventually found a special Caleb Williams card, but it was priced at $324 — well above the $120 limit Dominic had set for himself.
“I follow Coach,” the seller told Dominic. “$120?”
@theathletic Follow along with @COACHKOE │ SPORTS CARDS at The National Sports Collectiors Convention as he helps a young collector on his journey to find a Caleb Williams card! Sponsored by eBay. #chicagobears #calebwilliams #sportscards #nfl ♬ original sound – The AthleticThe Athletic published the 97-second video of Coach Koe and Dominic to TikTok. It’s one of around 75 videos The New York Times’ sports site has published with sports-focused creators since launching a pilot partnership program last September. Others include explainers, like “How did this 21-year old go from playing college golf to beating Scottie Scheffler less than two months after turning pro?” and another on “one of the most expensive pieces of grass ever sold.”
Ahead of the World Cup this summer, The Athletic also produced videos asking sports creators in different countries about their tournament predictions and favorite soccer moments. And at the start of last year’s NBA season, The Athletic partnered with the social media–based basketball publication @halfpast*noon on a post about breakout stars.
All told, the videos have gotten a combined 50 million views, said Adam Park, The Athletic’s director of video growth. Since last September, The Athletic has also gained 100,000 followers across its different platforms.
The Times has joined forces with creators in the past. Last summer, The Athletic inked a seven-figure deal to license “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” a sports journalism podcast by Pablo Torre. NYT Cooking has also been partnering with independent food creators to diversify its video content and reach new audiences.
Most of The Athletic’s video content is still made in-house with its journalists, but the publication sees creator partnerships as a way to find new audiences. Younger people, in particular, tend to prefer getting their news via video, rather than reading or listening. Park said the existing audience of The Athletic is “quite even across age demographics” but noted the creator-led videos were helping the sports news site work with younger creators that have developed similarly young audiences. The Athletic declined to share details about its audience demographics.
“We have internal creators that host, do podcasts, or social video, but we really wanted to tackle the idea of taking a large-scale newsroom and translating that into more of the human, personal touch of a creator,” Park said. “How do we translate to younger audiences, and make our newsroom accessible to everyone? This felt like the easiest way of doing that.”
Finding the right creators to collaborate with means “a lot of watching TikTok and YouTube,” head of creative development Craig Custance said. Park and then-video growth manager Jordan Pun (who now works as the head of social analytics for MrBeast) compiled lists of creators whose content they thought would mesh well with The Athletic’s brand.
“It was really important to us, as we started connecting with creators, that we found people that wouldn’t feel completely off brand,” Custance said. “The Athletic is not a place of hot takes. If we were to bring in really strong, opinionated creators, it just wouldn’t fit. If we’re connecting with their audience, it would just be a mismatch. We had a lot of conversations about whether the people we’re reaching out to match our journalistic DNA, our storytelling, and our deep analysis.”
The workflow relies on lots of communication between the Times newsroom and the creators, Park said. Sometimes the creators pitch ideas to editors, who will provide feedback and previous stories The Athletic has published on the subject. Other times, editors will flag newly-published stories with creators who might be interested in talking about the reporting in their videos. Creators are paid for their work, though The Athletic declined to provide details or payment rates for the partnerships.
One creator they worked with, Frank Michael Smith, was proactive in finding stories that worked for both his audience and The Athletic, Park said. Smith, who covers several sports and has more than two million TikTok followers, pitches his ideas, scripts the videos, then sends them to The Athletic for editing and a fact-check. Once the edits are in, he produces the videos and files them. The Athletic also has editors who oversee the particular sport or team mentioned in the video review the piece.
Smith then publishes them with The Athletic as a collaborator. Between October 2025 and April 2026, Smith published 24 videos with The Athletic, pulling in 27 million views in total.
“What we built was a blueprint: proof that the creator economy and legacy media aren’t competing,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn in April. “We’re much more powerful together.”
Vertical video — both with journalists and creators — has been a commercial opportunity for the publication. EBay sponsored at least two videos from the Sports Card Convention, including the Coach Koe video. The Athletic’s daily World Cup video recaps, anchored by different journalists, were sponsored by Amazon Prime. Fan interview videos on the street were sponsored by Apple TV. One video, where Smith explains how Spain and Argentina stacked up against each other ahead of the World Cup final, was sponsored by Kalshi. Other creator videos are unsponsored.
The videos aren’t straight advertisements for those companies. Instead, Custance said, the ideas for the videos originated in the newsroom with editorial purpose, and advertisers were approached afterwards.
“We were going to do [the videos] anyway,” he said. “It’s like getting an ad on your story. Now we’re generating revenue with it as well, which is ideal.”
Today, The Athletic usually has at least one creator on its production calendar to produce content, Park said. The Athletic is currently hiring for a video growth manager to lead and expand the creator program.
“We started out as a longform, written company and have evolved constantly since day one,” Custance said. “For us, this is how the audience wants to consume sports news and analysis — on TikTok and Instagram.These [creators] are the people that have found the most effective ways to do it. How can we tap into that and expand our journalism in that way?”
