NEW YORK, NY Oct. 23 (DPI) – Readers universally unloaded on a shockingly tone-deaf promotion of two classless young publishing entrepreneurs in the NYT today.

The report was surprisingly fawning of its subjects, who have launched a paid news service called The Athletic. And the report cast the two – from their quotations at least – as cocky and insensitive Silicon Valley louts.

Readers had a field day.

The article – titled “Why The Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers” – quoted the two young men extensively. The most popular comment repeats one of their most insensitive quotes:

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic, said in an interview in San Francisco. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.” So said the future monopolists and oligarchs of our country.

Even more odd about the article, it felt like a promotion by the reporter, who was shown up and embarrassed by editors who allowed the piece to be published. Such back-handed articles were once extremely rare in the NYT, whose editorial staff once looked out for one another.

The lead paragraph, byline by a Kevin Draper, in all its obsequiousness:

By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called The Athletic probably will have hired another well known sportswriter from your local newspaper. In a couple of years, once The Athletic has completed its breakneck expansion, perhaps that newspaper’s sports section will no longer exist.

The print newspaper business, by the way, has long since been trampled, so all the chest-beating bravado by the subjects comes across as somewhat ignorant of the marketplace.  A sampling of readers’ reaction:

After reading this smarmy article, one thing I promise: I will not be an Athletic Supporter.

Nice guys, suck their small competitors dry, may they go the way of Martin Shkreli.

They make me sick. I hope they stay away from my local paper. Parasites, sucking the life blood out of communities.

“We will hire hundreds in order to bleed dry operations that now employ thousands” — Predatory capitalists, and damned proud of it, as long as it lines their own pockets. This sums up what is dysfunctional about America today. I hope they fail.