Longtime Bay Area columnist Tim Kawakami moving on from The Athletic

The San Francisco Bay Area loves its sports. It also pays close attention to who is covering the local professional teams.

As the media landscape has changed over the last two decades, one of the constants has been Tim Kawakami. The longtime columnist has chronicled the Bay's championship successes with the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors, and he has provided honest critiques of the area's biggest failures, most recently the fall and impending departure of the Oakland Athletics under owner John Fisher.

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On Wednesday, Kawakami shared some career news on X after posting his latest column for The Athletic. He announced he is "changing companies" after spending eight years at The Athletic and will reveal his new job "in a few days."

Kawakami, who grew up in Oakland and the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, got his start in newspapers at the Philadelphia Daily News in the late 1980s. He then joined the Los Angeles Times, covering the NFL (Rams) and boxing (which led to his book about Oscar De La Hoya). He was promoted to the Lakers beat, where he covered Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

Kawakami moved back to the Bay Area to become a columnist for the Mercury News in San Jose. That's when he began to embrace the power of digital media, penning a "Talking Points" blog that became a must-read for Bay Area fans and sharing his unvarnished viewpoints on Twitter.

In July of 2017, Kawakami launched The Athletic Bay Area as its Editor-In-Chief. He remained in that role until 2021, when the company shifted its coverage focus from local to national.

Kawakami continued as a general columnist covering Bay Area sports. While his Golden State podcast "Warriors Plus Minus" with Anthony Slater and Marcus Thompson continued to thrive, he moved "The TK Show" off The Athletic platform. He created two new podcasts, "North South" with L.A. Times columnist Dylan Hernandez, and "49ers +/-" with Matt Barrows, The Athletic's 49ers beat writer.

Kawakami thanked The Athletic co-founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann for putting together "the greatest sports newsroom ever assembled."

"It remains an incredible place," Kawakami wrote on X. "What Alex and Adam built will last for a hundred years."

Full disclosure: In July of 2018, I was hired as Managing Editor of The Athletic Los Angeles a year after Kawakami was brought on board. He was my group manager, advising me and other city editors, and his wisdom was essential in the success of The Athletic L.A.

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