The New York Times announced Monday that it was disbanding its athletic department and relying on its website, The Athletic, for coverage of teams and games, both online and in print.
Times Editor-in-Chief Joe Kahn and Deputy Editor-in-Chief Monica Drake announced the newsroom change as “an evolution in the way we cover sports.”
“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, impactful news and corporate journalism that explores how sport intersects with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an e-mail Monday morning. Mail to the Times newsroom. “At the same time, we will be reducing the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The closure of the sports department, which employs more than 35 journalists and editors, is a big change for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and particularly the Sports of the Times column, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the most important moments and figures in American sports over the last century, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussion in the National Football League .
The move represents further integration into The Athletic’s newsroom, which The Times bought for $550 million in January 2022, and adds a publication that brings together some 400 journalists to cover more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles daily.
The Athletic staff will now provide the bulk of sporting event, athlete and league coverage for The Times readers and for the first time, The Athletic articles will appear in the Times print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic, which operates separately from the Times newsroom, is included for those who have subscribed to one or more The Times product packages.
Sports journalists will take on other roles in the newsroom and no layoffs are planned, Mr Kahn and Ms Drake said. A group on the business desk will deal with money and power in sport, while new sport-related topics will be added in other sections. The move is expected to be completed in the fall.
When The Times bought The Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company reach a wider audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes The Times’ main news site, along with Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service, and Games.
As a company, The Athletic has not yet turned a profit. In the first quarter of this year, the company reported a loss of $7.8 million. But the number of paying subscribers grew from just over one million at the time of the acquisition to over three million in March 2023.
Last November, The Times appointed Steven Ginsberg, a top editor at The Washington Post, as editor-in-chief of The Athletic. In June, The Athletic fired nearly 20 reporters and reassigned more than 20 others to new jobs. Those responsible explained that the branch would no longer allocate at least one Beat reporter to every sports team.
The acquisition of The Athletic had raised questions about the future of the Times’ sports department, which included many respected journalists. The Sports of the Times column was started in 1927 by John Kieran and later included a respected group of writers including Robert Lipsyte, William Rhoden, Harvey Araton, George Vecsey and Ira Berkow.
Three Sports of the Times columnists, Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson, have won Pulitzer Prizes for their sports articles. Mr. Daley has written more than 10,000 columns for The Times over the course of 32 years. (Another sportscaster, John Branch, won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for his work on a deadly avalanche in Washington state, and Josh Haner won the 2014 Feature Photography Award for documenting the recovery of a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.)
In recent years, with the advent of digital media, the Times sports section has begun to shrink, as have many other national and local newspapers. The department lost its independent daily printing department. Not every local team was assigned a Beat reporter. Box scores are gone.
On Sunday, a group of nearly 30 members of the Times sports desk sent a letter to Mr. Kahn and AG Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, chiding the company for “flipping with the wind” its sports staff since purchasing The Sporty.
Mr Sulzberger and the company’s chief executive, Meredith Kopit Levien, wrote in an email to staff on Monday that the company’s goal since acquiring The Athletic has been to become “a leading global sports journalism”.