The New York Times Is Shuttering Its Sports Desk

The New York Times announced on Monday that it is shuttering its Pulitzer Prize-winning sports desk, a major shift as the newspaper prepares to rely solely on a sports media giant it bought last year for its coverage of games and leagues.

Times executive editor Joe Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake announced the decision in an email to the newsroom on Monday morning, according to the paper. The executives described the change as “an evolution in how we cover 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,” the email read. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

According to Kahn and Drake, the more than 35 Times journalists who work on the 96-year-old sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom to avoid layoffs. A group on the business desk will reportedly cover money and power in sports, and other sections will feature new sports-related beats.

The executives said that the company will rely solely on The Athletic for its coverage of games, teams and leagues going forward, online and in print. The company bought The Athletic in January 2022 for $550 million, launching the integration of about 400 journalists that cover more than 200 professional sports teams.

A group of dozens of journalists on the Times sports desk sent a letter on Sunday to Kahn and A.G. Sulzberger, the newspaper’s publisher, criticizing the company for leaving its sports staff “twisting in the wind” since purchasing The Athletic.

“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,” read the letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

“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.”

On Monday, Sulzberger and company executive Meredith Kopit Levien told staff in an email that the company’s goal since buying The Athletic was to become “a global leader in sports journalism.”

Before the Times bought it, The Athletic was a subscription sports website that launched in 2016 and rapidly became one of the biggest sports media companies. The digital newsroom became known for taking sportswriters from local publications and contributing to the downfall of smaller sports desks.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Athletic co-founder Alex Mather said in a 2017 interview with the Times. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

While the sports desk at the Times was unionized, The Athletic is not. In June, The Athletic laid off almost 20 reporters and moved more than 20 to new jobs.