New York Times Shuts Down Sports Desk

variety.com:

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor It’s game over for the New York Times’ sports department: The newspaper is shutting down its sports desk and instead will rely on daily sports coverage from the Athletic, the popular website the company acquired last year for $550 million. “We intend to utilize the Athletic — which has among the largest sports newsrooms in the world — to provide Times readers with a greater abundance of sports coverage than ever before,” New York Times Co.

chairman A.G. Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien wrote in a memo Monday to employees about the change. “Under our plan, the digital homepage, newsletters, social feeds, the sports landing page and the print section will draw from even more of the approximately 150 stories the Athletic produces each day chronicling leagues, teams and players across the United States and around the globe.” The Times will reassign the 35-plus journalists and editors on its sports desk to “other desks around the newsroom,” the execs said, adding that there are “no plans for layoffs” associated with the change.

The Athletic has about 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. On Sunday, the Times reported, “nearly 30 members” of the paper’s sports desk sent a letter to executive editor Joseph Kahn and Sulzberger “chastising the company for leaving its sports staff ‘twisting in the wind’ since the purchase of The Athletic” in January 2022.

Read the memo to Times staffers from Sulzberger and Kopit Levien: Colleagues, Joe and Monica just shared with our colleagues in the newsroom plans to shift our approach to sports coverage, focusing more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism, and making greater use of The Athletic’s