The New York Times announced Monday that 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 as rumors mounted this weekend that the sports department would disappear in favor of The Athletic, The Times’ subscription sports site. paid $550 million last year.
The roughly 40 current members of the sports team will be offered other roles within the Times newsroom, executive editor Joseph Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake said in a statement. a note to staff on Monday.
The letter said the Times would form a group within its business section dedicated to covering money and power in sports.
“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and business journalism about how sports interact with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” they said in the memo. “At the same time, we will reduce editorial coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The Times said the changes will not result in layoffs among unionized staff and that in the coming days, newsroom management 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 floundering in the wind,” said the letter, which was obtained by the Washington Post on Sunday.
“We watched the company buy a competitor with hundreds of sports journalists and weigh in on decisions about the future of sports coverage at the Times without, in many cases, even a courtesy call, much less any solicitation of our expertise,” the letter continued.
“The company’s efforts appear to be reaching a fever pitch, with the Times pursuing a large-scale technology migration of The Athletic to Times platforms and the threat that the company will effectively shut down our section,” the letter added.
The temperature acquired The Athletic 18 months ago with the aim of integrating the site into its bundled offer including recipes and games.
But The Athletic is currently losing money and has set a goal of turning a profit by 2025.
“We intend to use The Athletic, which has one of the largest sports newsrooms in the world, to provide Times readers with more sports coverage than ever before,” Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in a separate memo to staff.
The Athletic employs about 400 people in North America and Europe and, since last year, has been hit by the layoff of 40 to 50 writers and editors due to headwinds facing the media and advertising industries, the Washington Post reported.
Last month, the The site laid off 20 editors and reassigned 20 others to different tasksaccording to the publication.
Despite its 3.3 million subscribers, The Athletic lost $7.8 million in the most recent quarter, on top of the $12.6 million it lost in the second quarter of last year and the $6.8 million it lost in February and March of last year, the Times reported in public filings.
Since the acquisition, there has been a noticeable overlap in sports coverage between the sports department and The Athletic, which, according to the Washington Post, prompted Kahn to tell sports teams this year that the Times had more reporters covering sports than any other subject and that greater integration was needed.
As speculation swirled Friday that the Times’ sports section would close, a spokeswoman for the newspaper told the Post:
“Since we purchased The Athletic, we’ve had discussions about what this means for the future of our sports coverage. We’ve implemented some changes, such as adding articles about The Athletic to the nytimes.com home screen. As with any area of coverage, we’ve been closely evaluating how to deliver the best possible sports journalism to our growing audience. We’ll keep you updated as we have more to share.”
The representative denied that managers told reporters they would be asked to leave the company or join The Athletic, despite rumors suggesting an imminent shakeup.
Complicating matters regarding any staff reductions is the fact that the Times is unionized, while The Athletic is not.
A representative for the Times’ union, the NewsGuild of New York, did not immediately comment.
According to CNN, the newspaper’s union blasted the decision, saying sports staffers were “given little notice of the change.”
The NewsGuild told the outlet that it intends to fight what it called a “blatant attempt at union destruction” and will work with sportswriters to uphold their rights as outlined in their union contracts.
Times staffers work under a new union contract ratified this year.
Sunday’s letter addressed that issue, saying management had promised there would be no layoffs in the Times newsroom and that the company recognized “that the New York Times Guild has jurisdiction over newsroom employment and that any plans to allow Athletic employees to perform bargaining unit work must be done in accordance with our union contract.”
The letter then asked: “Do these promises still hold?”
The letter refers to the history of the sports department, dating back to its coverage of the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.
Columnists Red Smith, Arthur Daley and Dave Anderson have won Pulitzer Prizes, as has John Branch in 2013 for his feature article.
The letter also highlights the sports division’s major revelations and its high-profile coverage of issues such as concussions in football, doping in horse racing, Russia’s detention of Brittney Griner and the injection of billions of Middle Eastern dollars into global sport.
Signatories to the letter included prominent baseball and NFL journalists 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 a football player’s harrowing journey out of Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported.
