New York Times To Disband Sports Division, Shift To Struggling Athletic

The New York Times announced it would disband its sports desk and shift coverage to The Athletic, a property of The Times.

Times' editors Joe Kahn and Monica Drake detailed the change to the newsroom on Monday, calling it “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 editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The current sports desk employs more than 35 journalists and editors.

New York Times Took On The Athletic Last Year

The shift is undoubtedly a demotion for the sports division. The Times purchased The Athletic for $550 million last year, well over its value.

The Athletic has undergone a series of layoffs and has struggled to turn its subsection service into a sufficient business model.

The outlet has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year.

Far fewer readers will consume sports reporters at The Athletic than did at the still highly-subscribed New York Times.

The Athletic has around 3 million subscribers, compared to nearly 10 million for The Times.

Perhaps the only silver lining is that some articles from The Athletic will appear in The Times’s print newspaper.

"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 two or more of The Times’s bundle of products," the outlet concluded.