The Gray Lady Strikes Out
The New York Times' decision to shutter its sports department fits into a depressingly familiar pattern.
Dear readers,
As working journalists, we keep pretty close tabs on the state of the American media, and over the past few years, we’ve heard the same thing over and over again: Although practically no one — from local news to print magazines to buzzy digital media sites — can turn a profit, there is one outlet, The New York Times, that is practically printing money. They’ve made smart digital bets, they’ve ingratiated themselves into every part of readers’ lives, and they know how to stay ahead of the curve.
This week, though, the ol’ Gray Lady made a decision — to nix its sports section —that left us scratching our heads (to put it kindly). More on that below.
-Ian and Calder
On Monday, The New York Times announced that it’s shuttering its sports section and re-assigning its sports reporters to other desks within the Times newsroom. The once-revered section had fallen somewhat from its glory days in the 1990s, but it continued to produce some of the best sports reporting in the country on a regular basis. Our roundups of the best sports stories of the week in this newsletter almost always include at least one piece from the Times.
In lieu of original reporting from its sportswriters, the Times will now rely on The Athletic — which it bought in 2022 for $550 million — for its coverage of games, trades, and other day-to-day sporting news. (According to Times management, former sportswriters will still cover the business and political side of sports from other desks, but we’ll believe it when we see it.) The Athletic, which launched to much fanfare in 2016, has plenty of capable and smart reporters, but it has operated according to a limited editorial mission: focus on breaking news, game recaps, insider information, and all the other small-bore news that sports aficionados inhale like air. By the same token, they have tended to de-prioritize longer narrative feature writing, and they avoid political issues in sports like the plague. They have taken to heart the edict that Times management handed down in June 2022: don’t inject any sort of politics into your reporting.
There are two stories to tell here about the demise of the sports section: one about nostalgia, and the other one about business. We think they’ve gotten it wrong on both counts, but let’s get the sappy stuff out of the way first.
Like so many other kids, one of us practically learned to read by pouring over box scores in the Times sports section every morning. (The other one had a similar experience with The Washington Post — if you know the two of us, you can probably guess who’s who.) When we launched Southpaw, we looked to the Times sports section as a model of the type of work we wanted to do. (We have, we’ll admit, mostly fallen short.) In our second issue, we couldn’t believe that Robert Lipsyte — a legendary Times sportswriter and a hero to both of us — agreed to speak with us. We covered a lot of ground in our conversation with him, but we spent much of our time discussing the selfishness that’s inherent to the professional sporting world and the way that modern athletes can turn a blind eye to the broader political and cultural worlds that they exist in. (For what it’s worth, Lipsyte told New York Magazine this week that the Times had never really valued its sports departments, and that he wasn’t too sad to see it shuttered, either. We politely disagree.)
In recent years, as the VC-driven takeover of digital media has accelerated, the same shortsightedness and greed that we’ve come to expect from organizations like the NFL has come to infect broader swaths of the media — and the Times, despite its family ownership, is no exception. Was the Times sports coverage perfect? No. (As Lipsyte pointed out, the section had in recent years devoted more coverage to English Premier League soccer than it has to the New York Mets). But what’s the point of enjoying cushy profit margins if you’re not going to use that money to invest in a section that readers love? A newspaper should be about more than making money; it should be about building a community of readers. The Times sports section certainly did that.
This brings us to our second point: the cold hard business dynamics underlying the decision.
To understand why the Times is axing its sports section, you have to revisit its decision to buy The Athletic back in 2022. At the time, Times management promised that “The Athletic will be operated separately from The Times’s newsroom and its sports section.” For regular readers of the Times’ sports section, this probably provided some consolation. But knowing what we know now, the statement takes on a more sinister tone. Because The Athletic operated separately from the Times newsroom, The Athletic’s journalists are ineligible to join the union that represents the rest of the Times’ reporters. Without that protection, the Times cut The Athletic’s newsroom by four percent in June, removing reporters from local beats around the country. (There was a not-so-subtle irony in this development, since The Athletic’s original business model in its pre-Times days was to outflank local sports desks, poach their reporters, and then consolidate their markets.)
Now, by re-assigning its sports reporters, the Times has effectively outsourced its sports reporting to a non-unionized workforce. (The NewsGuild claims that the move violates its new contract with the paper.) To make matters worse, management delivered the news to its unionized sports reporters in the worst way possible: On Monday morning, the Times released a press release announcing the move at the very same moment that it called its sportswriters into a meeting to tell them that their jobs had been cut, meaning that reporters didn’t even have a chance to tell their loved ones before the news went public. Some reporters who weren’t at the meeting allegedly found out from a news alert on their phones. Amidst the fallout of their decision, Times management is claiming that writers will have meaningful input into their next roles at the paper, but the writers themselves are saying that any plans for an orderly transition are unclear and ill-defined. As one reporter put it to Vanity Fair, “There hasn’t been empathy, and there also just hasn’t been honesty.”
An honest appraisal of the decision would reveal that, while the Times sports section was far from perfect, it was a hell of a lot better than what The Athletic — which has lost $36 million since the Times bought it — can offer. On the whole, the decision fits into a depressingly familiar pattern that we’re seeing across the media landscape: cut costs, reduce redundancies, be shocked when the cheaper product isn’t producing content that people want to read, then respond by cutting more costs. Executives get bailed out, and the rest of us get screwed. Whoops!
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . college football’s latest hazing scandal? “Northwestern fires football coach Pat Fitzgerald over hazing allegations,” by Cindy Boren and Des Bieler in The Washington Post (July 10, 2023).
. . . college football’s latest bribery scandal? “University of Tennessee Fined Millions for Cash Payments to Athletes,” by Santul Nerkar in The New York Times (RIP) (July 14, 2023).
. . . an abuse scandal in the rowing world? “A coach accused, again and again,” by Gus Garcia-Roberts in The Washington Post (July 13, 2023).
. . . Dave Zirin on the end of the New York Times sports desk? “The End of the New York Times Sports Page Is a Tragedy,” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (July 14, 2023).
. . . new oil money in D.C.-area sports? “Washington’s Favorite Teams — Now Partly Owned by a Foreign Autocracy,” by Michael Schaeffer in POLITICO Magazine (July 14, 2023).