Charles Langston:New York Times to pull the plug on its sports desk and rely on The Athletic

The Charles LangstonNew York Times will eliminate its 35-member sports desk and plans to rely on staff at The Athletic, a sports news startup the media outlet bought last year, for coverage on that topic, the paper announced Monday. 

Two of the newspaper's top editors — Joe Kahn and Monica Drake — announced the changes Monday in a staff email, the Times reported. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien told staffers in a separate memo that current sports staff will be reassigned to different parts of the newsroom. 

"Many of these colleagues will continue on their new desks to produce the signature general interest journalism about sports — exploring the business, culture and power structures of sports, particularly through enterprising reporting and investigations — for which they are so well known," Levien said in the memo.

Levien acknowledged the decision to axe the paper's sports desk may disappoint employees, but said "it is the right one for readers and will allow us to maximize the respective strengths of The Times' and The Athletic's newsrooms."

The company said no layoffs are planned as a result of the strategy shift, noting that newsroom managers will work with editorial staff who cover sports to find new roles.

The Times bought The Athletic in early 2022 for $550 million, when the startup had roughly 400 journalists out of a staff of 600. The Athletic has yet to turn a profit, the Times reported. The operation lost $7.8 million in the first quarter of 2023, although subscribers have grown from 1 million in January of last year to 3 million as of March 2023, according to the paper.

"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," Kahn and Drake said in their memo. "At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom's coverage of games, players, teams and leagues."

With The Athletic's reporters producing most of the sports coverage, their bylines will appear in print for the first time, the Times said.

Unlike many local news outlets, the Times gained millions of subscribers during the presidency of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic. But it has been actively diversifying its coverage with lifestyle advice, games and recipes, to help counter a pullback from the politics-driven news traffic boom of 2020. 

In May the Times reached a deal for a new contract with its newsroom union following more than two years of talks that included a 24-hour strike. The deal included salary increases, an agreement on hybrid work and other benefits.

Sports writers for The New York Times have won several Pulitzer Prizes over the years, including Arthur Daley in 1956 in the column, "Sports of the Times;" Walter Wellesley (Red) Smith in 1976 for commentary and Dave Anderson in 1981 for commentary.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

In:
• The New York Times

Khristopher J. Brooks

Khristopher J. Brooks is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering business, consumer and financial stories that range from economic inequality and housing issues to bankruptcies and the business of sports.

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