New York Times to shutter sports desk, rely on The Athletic for daily coverage

The New York Times said Monday it will close its sports department, which has produced Pulitzer Prize winners and legendary columnists, and turn to The Athletic for daily coverage.

The move comes amid growing whispers over the weekend of the demise of the sports desk in favor of The Athletic, the subscription-based sports site that the Times paid $550 million for last year.

The roughly 40 current sports staffers will be offered other roles within the Times newsroom, executive editor Joseph Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake said in a note to staff Monday. 

The letter said the Times would form a group within its business section focused on covering money and power in 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,” they said in the memo. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The Times said the changes will not result in layoffs among the unionized staff and that in the coming days, newsroom leadership will work to reassign journalists who worked in the sports department to new roles.

The announcement comes after nearly 30 writers and editors signed a letter that was recently sent to Kahn and A.G. Sulzberger, chairman of the New York Times Company.

“For 18 months, The New York Times has left its sports staff twisting in the wind,” said the letter, which was obtained by the Washington Post on Sunday.

“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 continued.

“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,” the letter added.

The Times acquired The Athletic 18 months ago with the goal of integrating the site into its bundle of offerings that includes recipes and games.

But The Athletic is currently losing money and has set a goal to turn a profit by 2025. 

“We intend to utilize The Athletic — which has among the largest sports newsrooms in the world — to provide Times readers with a greater abundance of sports coverage than ever before,” said Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien in a separate note to staff.

The Athletic employs around 400 staffers in North America and Europe, and as of last year, was hit by layoffs of between 40 and 50 writers and editors amid economic headwinds facing the media and advertising industries, the Washington Post reported.

Just last month, the site shed 20 writers and reassigned 20 others to different beats, according to the publication.

Despite having 3.3 million subscribers, The Athletic lost $7.8 million last quarter, on top of losing $12.6 million in the second quarter last year and $6.8 million in February and March of last year, the Times has reported in public filings.

Since the acquisition, there has been notable overlap in sports coverage between the sports department and The Athletic, which, according to the Washington Post, prompted Kahn to tell sports staffers this year that the Times had more reporters covering sports than any other topic and that there needed to be more integration.

Amid speculation on Friday that the Times’ sports section would be shuttered, a spokeswoman for the Times told The Post:

“We’ve had conversations since we bought The Athletic about what it means for the future of our sports coverage. We’ve rolled out some changes, such as including Athletic stories on the nytimes.com home screen. As with any coverage area, we have been closely evaluating how to deliver the best possible sports journalism for our growing audience. We’ll update when we have more to share.”

The rep denied that managers had been telling reporters that they would be asked to leave the company or join The Athletic, despite buzz suggesting an impending shakeup.

Complicating matters regarding any downsizing is the fact that the Times is unionized and The Athletic is not.

A rep from the Times’ union, the NewsGuild of New York, did not immediately comment.

Times staffers are working under a new union contract that was ratified this year.

Sunday’s letter spoke to that issue, stating that leadership promised there would be no layoffs in the Times newsroom and also that the company acknowledged “that the New York Times Guild has jurisdiction over newsroom jobs and that any plan for Athletic employees to perform bargaining unit work must be done in accordance with our union contract.”

The letter then asked: “Do those promises still hold?”

The letter references the history of the sports department, dating from its coverage of the first Olympics in Athens in 1896.

Columnists Red Smith, Arthur Daley and Dave Anderson won Pulitzers, as did John Branch in 2013 for feature writing.

The letter also highlights the sports division’s big scoops and leading coverage on issues such as concussions in football, doping in horse racing, Russia’s detention of Brittney Griner and the injection of billions of dollars from the Middle East into global sports.

Among the signers of the letter were prominent baseball and NFL writers Tyler Kepner and Ken Belson; Jenny Vrentas, an investigative reporter who has written extensively about NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson; and Juliet Macur, who last year chronicled the harrowing journey of a female soccer player out of Afghanistan, the Washington Post said.