Eighteen months after The New York Times’s $550 million acquisition of The Athletic, The Times guts its sports staff, replacing them with reporters from The Athletic. The news comes a day after 28 writers and editors of The Times’s sports department wrote to leadership at The Times, asking about the future of the sports desk and their jobs, according to the Washington Post.

“For 18 months, The New York Times has left its sports staff twisting in the wind. 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,” said Sunday’s letter, which the Washington Post obtained.

Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, deputy managing editor, shared the news with staff via email Monday morning.

“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 editors wrote. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

In a statement shared by the Washington Post, a spokesperson for The Times said, “We’ve had conversations since we bought The Athletic about what it means for the future of our sports coverage. We’ve rolled out some changes, such as including Athletic stories on the nytimes.com home screen. As with any coverage area, we have been closely evaluating how to deliver the best possible sports journalism for our growing audience.”

Anticipated changes

The Times’s sports desk has more than 35 reporters and editors, said The New York Times in their news coverage of the story. The sports desk staff will be moved to other roles within the newsroom, and no layoffs are planned. Moving forward, The Athletic will cover the bulk of sports news, including games, athletes and professional sports leagues, a major shift in The Times’s sports coverage strategy.

Sports news written by The Athletic’s reporters will also appear in the print edition of The New York Times for the first time. Readers who subscribe to The Times’s all-access bundle will have online access to The Athletic. The bundle also includes access to The Times’s news coverage, Wirecutter, Games and Cooking. The current promotional offer for the all-access bundle is $1.50 a week, billed at $6.00 every four weeks, for the first six months. At that time, the subscription will automatically renew at the standard rate of $25 every four weeks until canceled. The Athletic also offers a standalone subscription, currently available for $7.99 a month, billed monthly, or $5.99 a month, billed annually.

The New York Times Guild speaks out

On Monday, members of The New York Times Guild, who are represented by The NewsGuild of New York, shared a statement about the shuttering of the sports news desk as they knew it. Guild members said they received almost no notice of the change, and some learned about the change in a news alert on their phones.

“As members of the New York Times Guild, we are baffled and infuriated by the Times proposal to dissolve our storied and award-winning Sports department. This announcement is a profound betrayal of our colleagues and of Times values. Times leadership is attempting to outsource union jobs on our sports desk to a non-union Times subsidiary under the preposterous argument that The Times can ‘subcontract’ its sports coverage to itself,” the statement read.

Of particular concern is the fact that, after two years of bargaining, The New York Times and newsroom staff finally came to an agreement in May. The Athletic’s news team is not represented by a union.

“We will fight this flagrant attempt at union-busting with every tool we have. And we will work with our members in Sports to defend their rights under our union contract. Our standard is clear: Union work at The Times Company is performed by union workers,” the members said in the statement.

The Athletic’s June reorganization

The Athletic recently went through its own reorganization, perhaps in preparation for the changes to come. In June, The Athletic laid off about 20 reporters, or 4% of its newsroom, and reassigned 20 others. Staff received the announcement in a note from David Perpich, publisher, and Steven Ginsberg, executive editor of The Athletic, who called this a “significant reorganization.”

“Even with the changes being announced today, the size of our newsroom will grow this year compared to last, as will our overall investments in our editorial group in the years ahead,” said Perpich and Ginsberg in the note to staff. “At the end of this process, we will have more than 100 beat reporters on teams.”

The Athletic still operating at a loss

Since The Athletic was acquired by The Times, the sports news outlet has not turned a profit, though subscribers continue to grow. In the first quarter of 2023, The Athletic had 3.27 million digital-only subscribers, compared to 1.22 million the first quarter of 2022. The Athletic’s first quarter adjusted operating loss was $7.8 million.

Insider Take

We are (almost) speechless. Mergers and acquisitions almost always bring the elimination of redundancies, cost-cutting measures, reorganization and layoffs, but this goes far beyond the standard. For The New York Times, The Athletic was a loss leader. It brought sports fans to The Times as standalone or all-access bundle subscribers, but it wasn’t yet yielding a profit. In fact, a profit may have been several years down the road yet. These actions were anything but transparent.

The Times’s sports writers and editors knew something was amiss, and they attempted to address leadership head on with their concerns, but instead, they got the boot. Staff may be reassigned, but covering sports is so different than covering any other type of news. From a business perspective, we understand that difficult decisions sometimes have to be made, but The Times’s leadership had to know this was in the works. Was there a more humane way to integrate the quality work of The Athletic without gutting The Times’s sports staff, who have a deep and well-respected legacy in the sports arena? What’s next? We expect further cost cutting and reorganization of The Athletic staff. We also expect the newsroom’s union to step in and fight back.  

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