The New York Times has announced it will be closing its internal sports department and will instead cover teams and games through The Athletic, a subscription-based sports website acquired by the company last year.
The shuttering of the sports newsroom, comprised of more than 35 journalists, comes 18 months after The Times bought The Athletic, which boats 400 journalists, for $550 million.
At the time of the acquisition, Chief Executive Officer Meredith Kopit Levien said the sports website would exist as a “stand-alone product.” The Athletic staff will now provide much of the coverage around sporting events, players and teams.
The Times will solidify the shift by packaging The Athletic with the current NYTimes.com subscription and promoting the site’s articles on the Times homepage.
The outside of the New York Times Building pictured in midtown Manhattan. (Fox News Photo/Joshua Comins)
No layoffs are expected as a result of this shakeup and journalists who currently work on the sports desk will move to other rooms within the newsroom. Additionally, some business deck reporters will cover money and power in sports while new angles around sports will be integrated into existing verticals.
Times’ Executive Editor Joe Kahn, alongside Deputy Managing Editor Monica Drake, announced the move on Monday, calling it “an evolution in how we cover sports.”
“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large. At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues,” the editors added.
The New York Times acquired The Athletic in January 2023 for $550 million. (Fox News Photo/Joshua Comins)
In June, The Athletic laid off nearly 20 reporters and reorganized 20 others to new positions. The website has yet to turn a profit and lost $7.8 million in the first quarter of 2023. However, the number of paid subscribers has grown by more than 3 million as of March, up from 1 million since the acquisition.
Over the last several years, the sports department at the Times has become smaller and smaller. The desk eventually lost its stand-alone section in the daily print and local teams were no longer guaranteed an assigned beat reporter.
Times Chairman A.G. Sulzberger and Levien emailed staff on Monday and said the company’s goal since acquiring The Athletic has been to become “a global leader in sports journalism.”
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In a letter sent to management, The New York Times sports department accused the company of leaving their staff “twisting in the wind.” (Getty Images)
The sports department sent a letter to Sulzberger and Kahn a day earlier, accusing the company of leaving their staff “twisting in the wind” for 18 months.
“We have watched the company buy a competitor with hundreds of sportswriters and weigh decisions about the future of sports coverage at The Times without, in many instances, so much as a courtesy call, let alone any solicitation of our expertise,” the letter said.
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“The company’s efforts appear to be coming to a head, with The Times pursuing a full-scale technological migration of The Athletic to The Times’s platforms and the threat that the company will effectively shut down our section.”
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