For years, Clay Travis was the heart of Outkick, a conservative sports commentary site that Fox Corp. bought in 2021. The provocative and unapologetic commentator hosts a popular podcast and co-hosts a three-hour talk radio show in the time slot once held by “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” Fox gave him a show on the sports network FS1 and a slot on the Fox pregame show “Big Noon Kickoff.”
But this June, Mr. Travis left Outkick to start a competitor. Now, Fox is making moves to draw in sports fans to Outkick without Mr. Travis at its center.
In June, the digital arm of Fox News brought Outkick into its larger operation and gave it an updated logo and a new tagline two months later, billing it as a place where “sports and culture collide.” Traffic is up since then, a Fox spokesman said, citing data from Comscore showing a 19 percent month-over-month increase in August.
The plan, according to Tommy Firth, the executive vice president for editorial of Fox News Digital, is to focus on sports fans who want “coverage from the other side” and “funny irreverence.”
The site is investing in an expansion of its sports coverage, which has focused mostly on professional football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey. It will ramp up its coverage of wrestling, hunting, fishing and college sports, Mr. Firth said.
It’s also adding new writers: On Wednesday, Outkick is expected to announce the hiring of Matt Calkins, a longtime sports columnist who quit The Seattle Times when the newspaper refused to publish a column he wrote about transgender athletes. In it, he argued that supporting a ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports did not automatically make a person transphobic.
Last month, Fox announced that it had also brought aboard Craig Carton, a New York drive-time radio host, to create a sports and culture show for Outkick.
“Politics are downstream from culture, and all this seems to be downstream from sports,” Mr. Firth said. “Everything is one big frothy mix, and whether you like it or not, we choose not to stick our head in the sand and ignore it.”
Sports have become increasingly central to the media industry. Live games are still reliable drivers of television viewership, and many media companies — including The Wall Street Journal and CNBC — are investing in sports coverage to attract readers and viewers. The New York Times purchased The Athletic, a sports media company, in 2022 for $550 million.
Mr. Calkins, who started this week, said in an interview that both Mr. Firth and Mr. Travis got in touch with him after he posted about his resignation this summer. Mr. Calkins said that he chose Outkick because it offered him freedom he felt he didn’t have at The Seattle Times. A spokeswoman from The Seattle Times did not respond to a request for comment.
His new job calls for multiple columns a week, which Mr. Calkins says will focus largely on issues involving sports, politics and culture. He cited columns he’s written for Substack as precursors to his work at Outkick, including one post about Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback who knelt in protest during the national anthem after being enraged by police killings. The post asked whether Mr. Kaepernick had done “more harm than good for the Black community.”
“That got a very mixed reaction,” Mr. Calkins said. “A lot of people really liked it, a lot of people didn’t like it, but to me it’s something that I stood behind.”
Mr. Travis has remained supportive of Outkick, and he still hosts “OutKick the Show” on FS1 in addition to his ongoing contributor role on Fox News. His new site, Sport & State, has an unconventional business model: Mr. Travis has said that he will either own or hold substantial stakes in the companies he promotes, including a law firm with a personal injury practice and a mortgage lender.
