The Gist, a female-founded sports newsletter, is ready for its break-out moment.
Women’s sports are hot, the media that covers it isn't far behind.
This week my social feeds were flooded with clips of Rory McIlroy, the Masters tournament winner. I have never clicked on a link about golf in my life. Nor do I think of myself as any kind of sports fan. But when I chatted to Jacie deHoop, co-founder of sports newsletter The Gist, she helped me think differently. I watch tennis and soccer, I enjoy the Tour de France and the Olympics, skiing and ice-skating - maybe I am a sports fan after all. I signed up to the newsletter intrigued by whether a female founded sports media venture can make both men’s and women’s sports appetizing to someone like me.
The co-founders, who also include Ellen Hyslop and Roslyn McLart, are not journalists and they don’t have a sports background, but they are sports fans and they watched as young female associates were excluded from sports events in the finance industry they worked in. They founded the newsletter in 2017 and today a 45 person team is filing stories on everything from luxury marketers like Coach tying up with the WNBA to the viewership numbers of Women’s March Madness and they’re winning ads from major companies like Nike and Verizon.
When I worked at the New York Post covering sports business eight years ago, I talked to talent agents about how little sponsorship revenue they were able to direct to successful women’s leagues. There was a ho-hum, what-can-we-do, response. The Gist’s newsletter and podcast has proven there is a market serving female sports fans; it has a million subscribers, a 46 percent open rate and is expanding with a new deal with ad firm Kargo. Fresh from SXSW, the company is heading to Cannes Lions in June. Head of partnerships and revenue, deHoop chatted with The Media Mix about what The Gist is all about.
Q: Can you talk about investors and fundraising?
A: “We’re not VC backed, but we have brought on some strategic investors. We also did an accelerator named Tech Stars with Comcast NBCUniversal which is a small investor. Then we did another kind of program a few years ago where [tennis star] Billie Jean King came on as an investor, with RGA ventures and Elysian Park.
Q: How did you get started?
A: “My co-founders and I came from the finance world, or financial services but all played a lot of sports. Sports can often feel like this boy’s club, whether that’s from a playing perspective, from a fandom perspective. Sometimes as a female fan you could feel on the other side of that. It was really exacerbated in finance, it’s a very corporate environment, and all guys all the time. At the time, less than four percent of media coverage was on women’s sports and female athletes. The media and the storylines that we consume tell us what’s important when it comes to culture and sports. Less than 14% of sports journalists are women. The entire space felt very male dominated. We wanted to create a community, a content space that really centers the female fan and centers women in sports.”
Q: What is the content? The newsletter is four times a week.
A: “We're definitely more in the kind of curating space. The premise is that we give you, “the gist” of what’s happening in the sports world. It’s under a five minute read. If you’re going into your day, you want to know what's happening in the sports world. For someone who’s maybe a more casual fan, or somebody who hasn’t felt like sports is for them, they’re not going to subscribe to a super long piece of content.
Q: What are you doing beyond the newsletter?
A: “We have a pretty large social presence as well, Instagram and Tik Tok, and then we also have our podcast.” [The Gist of It.]
Q: How are you monetizing the content?
A: “Our content is free, so we monetize purely through brand partnerships. There are a lot of brands who have been with us from day one before female athletes were having this huge moment that Caitlin Clark kind of tipped over the edge.”
“Then there’s a lot of new brands and marketers that are evaluating the space too and wanting to invest. There is a huge marketing opportunity around women’s sports and there’s been a shift in the last two years. We were getting so many questions on women’s sports and then more recently, marketers are thinking a little bit more about, “how we engage in a better way with female fans through our men’s sports sponsorships?”
Q: Tell me about the entrepreneurial path?
A: “When we first launched, we did a little bit of fundraising throughout our first few years and with a lot of female founders, when you have a product or an offering that’s specifically for women, the reality of the financing space is that it’s often men evaluating whether it’s an opportunity. So we certainly had a lot of people in our early days say women’s sports didn’t have the cultural cachet that they do now. So many people want to invest, spend with us, it’s very different. The demand is there, but it was certainly an uphill battle. We had a lot of investors just say ESPN has tried this, or there just isn’t really a market for it. I think that there’s just a lot of inherent bias. We’re young women, we don’t have a track record of doing this before, so there certainly were [people] who were like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to put my trust in these young women.’ I focus on the people that do get it; there’s always going to be people that are kind of naysayers as well. It’s very difficult to convince somebody that already has a lot of that bias, right?
Q: You have a new partnership with ad firm Kargo, how is it going on the ad-sales front?
A: Nike has been with us from the very early days and then we worked with a lot of early adopters in the women’s sports space too like State Farm. Verizon is one of our largest partners. We just did a big activation with them at the Super Bowl. We have a lot of partners in the apparel space, Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour, and quite a few in the financial services space and a lot of different banks and insurance companies.
Q: And so where do you see things going next?
A: “There’s a lot of momentum, and I think we have a lot of exciting things that we’re going to be launching. We’re taking everything that we do to a whole other level in 2025. The legacy that we want The Gist to leave is really in diversifying the sports world overall so that there’s more women working in sports, creating content around sports, whether that’s in the front office or more female athletes, just like we want more women to feel like sports is a place for them.
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I'm a sports fan and a fan of startups /business so this interesting! Kudos to them. I am a little taken back that they felt excluded in the finance world. In my little circle of Razorback fans on Twitter the women are just as much part of it as the men. Strange how different worlds see things. I love to talk to women friends about pro wrestling! And Razorback sports!