JUST IN: New York Times To Shutter Sports Desk, Shift Coverage to The Athletic

The New York Times announced that it would shutter its sports desk and shift the coverage it provided over to The Athletic on Monday.

Executive editor Joe Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake explained in an email to the paper’s staff that the Times plans “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,” with less “coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

Coverage of sports will now be relegated to The Athletic, which the Times purchased last year for $550 million. From the Gray Lady’s self-reporting on the decision and its consequences:

The staff of The Athletic will now provide the bulk of the coverage of sporting events, athletes and leagues for Times readers and, for the first time, articles from The Athletic will appear in The Times’s print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic, which is operated separately from The Times newsroom, is included for those who subscribe to NYTimes.com.

Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom and there were no planned layoffs, Mr. Kahn and Ms. Drake said. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The moves are expected to be completed by the fall.

When The Times bought The Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a broader audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes the main Times news site as well as Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service and Games.

As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.