Chris Sprow on The Athletic’s latest newsletter ‘Peak’ and a look ahead into 2026

The sports media landscape continues to change rapidly, and The Athletic is adapting.

The Athletic has 10 million subscribers across its 11 newsletters, up from five million in May 2025. The newsletters are free to read and cover a wide range of sports news. Its latest offering is the Peak newsletter, which examines personal development and success through the lens of sports, connecting readers to the mental tools athletes and coaches use to succeed.

We spoke with Chris Sprow, The Athletic’s director of creative development, to learn more about Peak and the growth of The Athletic, the subscription-based sports publication of The New York Times.

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Awful Announcing: How is Peak different from the other newsletters from The Athletic?

Chris Sprow: “The Peak is, in covering the mental side of sports, a newsletter that can really get to athletes from any sport, coaches from any sport, um, and their habits, their rituals, the things that work for them, the things that cause them to fail, and tell their stories. Every other newsletter, aside from The Pulse, is about a specific sport. The Peak transcends sports in that way. It just allows us to tell stories from everywhere.”

Has a particular story from Peak resonated with readers?

“I think what’s fascinating about The Peak is its ability to surprise. Rustin Dodd, one of our senior writers, did a story where he tried to drink Dan Campbell’s coffee order, which seems like a recipe for your heart to explode. And that was basically his experience. On the other end of the spectrum, we broke down why Roger Federer’s graduation speech to Dartmouth was so fascinating. For me, it was the fact that this guy, arguably the best tennis player in history, talked about how he’d only won (54%) of the points he’d ever played, which seems like such an astonishing thing. So that one really resonated as well.”

How does the Peak newsletter fit within the overall brand of The Athletic?

“I think it reflects our readers’ curiosity. When you look at the data with The Athletic, it’s fascinating how many different things certain people follow and the kinds of things they’re interested in. There’s a high curiosity factor. They’re high-intent people who, in most cases, are willing to pay for good journalism. They’re interested in stories that go beyond the outcomes of games. That’s right in the wheelhouse of Peak. If you’re finding out little secrets about how athletes will succeed and fail, it’s generally well-suited to a curious audience. I think that’s what we have.”

How have you been able to grow your newsletters so quickly?

“Well, it’s a combination of things. For one, we’ve seen strong audience growth at The Athletic. We’re still a pup. The company’s not that old. I was an ESPN employee. ESPN has been around since 1979. So, compared to others in the market, we’re still relatively new, and we’ve grown our audience, which is full of high-intent readers.

“When people sign up, they’re registering for newsletters and the opportunity to get newsletters specifically in subject areas they really like. The Pulse has grown really well. And all our newsletters share some DNA. The growth of The Pulse, which also links to other newsletters, allows us to see who is really liking our newsletters. So if you’re a reader who reads The Pulse every single day and reads a ton of our NHL coverage, which I think is the best in the world, we’re going to send you a Red Light newsletter so you can try it out.”

What is a newsletter to you?

“Newsletters get people really caught up quickly and help them learn something they want to share. It’s interesting enough that they want to share it. I hope they laugh once or twice. And through all those things, we need to have a voice. We need to use the word I more than journalists are typically comfortable doing, because we need to remind people that there’s a human perspective behind this, because there’s a lot of AI going on.

“And then, ultimately, like, in the same way that The Morning is another front door to the New York Times, our newsletters have to be a front door into our coverage, meaning they don’t just need to have a voice and get you caught up, but they need to show, ‘Hey, you should read this.'”

Why should that matter to readers?

“This is a place that publishes well over 100 stories a day. Readers really appreciate it when you tell them, ‘Hey, this is a (good five-minute read).’ I get notes to our Pulse inbox all the time that say, ‘I never would have thought to read this, but you guys told me to, and I did. And it was awesome.’ Whether it’s about the Quad God figure skater Marcus Thompson wrote about last week. You might not ever see that, but we’re going do our best to surface that kind of new, fun material for people.”

Do people see The Athletic as a place for news or commentary?

“I tend to think both. I came over from ESPN a little over five years ago, and at the time, I had a lot of respect for the coverage. But I was like, man, they have so many incredible journalists. I wish they’d be more aggressive on the news. And I think now, just because of the company’s focus on it, we’re extremely aggressive on the news. We have great newsbreakers in-house. And then we try to surround that news with commentary. When the Sherrone Moore stuff happened at Michigan a few weeks ago, we were breaking aspects of the story. We were on the scene. We were writing commentary around the story.”

Looking for actionable ideas and lessons from the mental side of sports?

Have we got just the thing!

Sign up for the free, weekly Peak newsletter here: https://t.co/8CRMnLGycA pic.twitter.com/UuogOhFWtQ

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) January 8, 2026

What does the role of director of creative development entail?

“They created this department a few years ago, as commercial interest in The Athletic was really exploding and continues to. It’s a way to help us. Newsletters didn’t exist when I got here. We launched The Pulse in the summer of 2021. When you’re sending newsletters to almost 11 million inboxes every day, it’s like, ‘Oh, I think we kind of need to create a department that kind of houses these things,’ whether it’s new video ambitions, newsletters, podcasts, or new ambitions around podcasts, such as the Pablo Torre show. The creative development team was formed to meet those ambitions and work with our newsroom.”

What does 2026 look like for The Athletic?

“It looks exciting. We’ve got the Olympics coming up, so we’re going all in. We’re going to do a pop-up newsletter about the Olympics to get people caught up. That’s going to reach over a million people. We’re going to do the same thing with the World Cup. No offense to anybody else, but I think we have the best soccer reporting on the planet. The Athletic FC is an amazing newsletter. Spring’s always fun, baseball is getting going, and the NFL draft. We have so much coverage in these areas. It’s a year full of promise and possibilities.”

How would you convince someone to subscribe?

“I would say it’s not just the coverage. It’s an actual place with a community. You can go to ESPN, but you cannot talk with other fans in any way, shape, or form. That goes for a lot of places. Our readers tell us all the time, ‘I love The Athletic because I get to communicate with other fans.’ In some ways, it’s already the Reddit of sports. And we’re going to continue to lean into that. We’re going to continue to have our journalists talk back to fans and engage them. It’s fun to see our podcasts on the road to sold-out venues. We’re just going to continue to lean into the conversation we’re driving and take fans really seriously from the standpoint that they have a voice, they have input.”