The New York Times announces the end of the sports section – 07/10/2023 – Market

The New York Times said on Monday (10) it will dissolve its sports section and rely on teams and games coverage from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.

Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, and Monica Drake, deputy managing editor, heralded the newsroom change as “an evolution in our sports coverage.”

“We plan to focus even more directly on important, high-impact news and business journalism about how sports relate to money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to the Times newsroom. on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will reduce coverage of games, players, teams and leagues in the newsroom.”

The closing of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a big change for the Times. Its coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and in particular its “Sports of the Times” column, was once a mainstay of American sports journalism. The section covered key moments and personalities in American sports over the last century, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency in the NBA, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball, and the deadly effects of concussions on the National League of America. Soccer.

The move represents further integration into the Athletic newsroom, which the Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had about 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. He publishes around 150 articles a day.

Athletic staff will now provide the majority of coverage of sporting events, athletes and championships for Times readers and, for the first time, Athletic reporting will appear in the print edition of the Times. Online access to Athletic, which is operated separately from the Times newsroom, is included for subscribers to one or more Times product bundles.

Journalists in the sports section will move to other roles in the newsroom, and no layoffs are planned, Kahn and Drake said. An economics editorial group will cover money and power in sports, while new sports topics will be added to other sections. It is anticipated that the changes will be completed by the fall.

When the Times bought Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a wider audience. They’ve added it to a subscription package that includes the Times’ main news site, plus Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service, and Games.

As a company, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit – it posted a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to over 3 million by March 2023 from just over 1 million when it was acquired.

Last November, the Times named Steven Ginsberg, a top editor at The Washington Post, as executive editor of Athletic. In June, Athletic sacked nearly 20 reporters and transferred more than 20 others to new roles. Its directors said the outlet would no longer assign at least one special reporter to each sports team.

The acquisition of Athletic has raised questions about the future of the Times sports department, which includes a number of distinguished journalists. The “Sports of the Times” column was started by John Kieran in 1927 and would later include a notable group of journalists 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 writing. Daley wrote over 10,000 columns for the Times over 32 years. (Another sports reporter, John Branch, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his article on a deadly avalanche in Washington state, and Josh Haner won the photography award in 2014 for documenting the recovery of a Boston Marathon bombing survivor. )

In recent years, with the rise of digital media, the Times’ sports section has begun to decline, as have many other national and local newspapers. The section lost its independent daily print version. Not every local team has a special reporter. Player highscore tables are gone.

On Sunday, a group of nearly 30 members of the Times sports section sent a letter to Kahn and AG Sulzberger, the Times editor, criticizing the company for leaving its sports team “flapping in the wind” since its purchase of Athletic. .

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 Athletic was to become “a global leader in sports journalism.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves