Startup poaches top columnist, sparking Bay Area sports media shakeup

The Bay Area’s top sports columnist for the past two decades is making another surprising career leap.

Tim Kawakami announced he was joining the San Francisco Standard on Friday morning, two days after publishing his final column for The Athletic and posting to The X about his departure.

Kawakami revealed the move in the latest episode of “The TK Show,” a podcast posted early Friday morning, and also said he would be joined at The Standard by The Athletic’s 49ers reporter David Lombardi, who announced he was leaving the company on Thursday. Kawakami teased on X that a big announcement could be coming later Friday morning.

Kawakami left the San Jose Mercury News in 2017 to help launch The Athletic’s Bay Area bureau, which was then a startup. In his first series of posts on Wednesday, Kawakami hinted at his new landing spot, comparing his then-unnamed new home to his first move to The Athletic.

“Starting @theathleticsf and working with Alex (Mather) and Adam (Hansman) (co-founders) and experiencing all the inevitable changes at the company has me excited to do something similar again in the Bay Area,” Kawakami wrote on Wednesday. “I’m experiencing that feeling again in a new location and it feels amazing.”

After being hired as editor-in-chief of The Athletic’s Bay Area bureau, Kawakami quickly brought some of the region’s top sports journalists to the San Francisco-based company and continued to add more talent over the next few years, many of whom praised him on Wednesday when he announced he was leaving The Athletic.

In a series of X posts on Wednesday, Kawakami praised The Athletic’s founders, Mather and Hansman, saying the duo “created the greatest sports newsroom in history.” Mather and Hansman sold The Athletic to The New York Times for $550 million in 2022, and Kawakami has apparently had differences with Times management since then.

Kawakami also took ownership of his podcast, “The TK Show,” outside of The Athletic within the past year and said in the thread that he will continue to run it in his new role. The podcast includes weekly 49ers-focused episodes with former Athletic colleague Matt Burrows and a Northern and Southern California conversation episode with Los Angeles Times columnist Dylan Hernandez. He also said the future of “Warriors Plus-Minus,” a Warriors show he does with two Athletic writers, Marcus Thompson and Anthony Slater, is uncertain.

Kawakami will now start work at The Standard, a San Francisco online news organization founded by billionaire Michael Moritz in 2021. Aside from a brief period in the site’s early days, when reporters primarily covered local high school sports, The Standard has largely ignored sports coverage.

For Lombardi, Sunday’s 49ers game will be his final coverage with the company, where he has worked since being assigned to the Bay Area office for a few months in 2017. Lombardi has also built a sizable following for his 49ers coverage on his YouTube channel, with more than 77,000 subscribers.

The hiring of Kawakami and Lombardi, and other potential new hires at the organization, appears timed to coincide with bigger changes at the publication: In a recent New York Times feature on the San Francisco journalism industry, Standard CEO Griffin Gaffney said the company “plans to launch a new subscription service later this year.”

Kawakami spoke at length about his decision to leave The Athletic for the Standard to launch his own Friday podcast show, and revealed his plans for the new media.

“The concept of The Athletic Bay Area was about winning in the Bay Area, being great in the Bay Area, reporters who know the team well and cover it well, and loyal readers who will pay to read about that team every day or whatever regular schedule they have,” Kawakami said. “At Standard, it’s not as big an idea, but it’s more about … publishing good sports stories and doing it smartly, not necessarily covering every story, but something similar. What can we do to earn the loyalty of our readers and be consistently read and must-read?”

Kawakami said he felt the Athletics’ goals had broadened during his seven-plus years there to become “domestic and internationally focused,” and while he understood that was a natural progression, he said he saw the move to Standard as a “going back to basics” to focus on Bay Area teams like the 49ers, Warriors and Giants.

“Big companies are like battleships,” Kawakami says, “and they’ve worked really hard to get to where they want to go. You can’t change it twice. You’ll need seven committees and 18 bureaucratic structures, and it won’t work.”

“I love the light-heartedness of the Standard. Every time I spoke to them it was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s give it a go.’ And I think that’s the real success of the newspaper and the real success of journalism.”

This breaking news story will be updated.