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The New York Times is shutting down its sports department with plans to depend on The Athletic, a subscription-based outlet acquired last year, for the bulk of its coverage, the newspaper said Monday.
Stories from The Athletic will appear on The Times’ website and in its print newspaper, top editors told staffers in an email.
“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,” reads the email sent by executive editor Joe Kahn and deputing managing editor Monica Drake.
“At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The Times doesn’t plan to lay off anyone from its sports section, which has more than 35 employees, and says it intends to place them in different roles by the fall.
Established in 2016 as a digital-only sports destination, The Athletic was purchased by The Times in January 2022 for $550 million. The outlet employs more than 400 journalists and covers sports throughout North America and part of the United Kingdom, with the NFL, the NBA and MLB among its main areas of focus.
The Athletic boasts more than 3 million subscribers, up from about a million since being bought by The Times. The Athletic has not become profitable yet, however, and laid off approximately 20 employees — or nearly 4% of its newsroom — last month.
Monday’s announcement came a day after many of The Times’ sports staffers signed a letter to the newspaper’s management asking for clarity on their futures.
“For 18 months, The New York Times has left its sports staff twisting in the wind,” read the letter obtained by The Washington Post. “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.”
In Monday’s email, Kahn and Drake described disbanding the department as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”
