The New York Times has announced its decision to dissolve its sports department and instead depend on The Athletic, a website, for coverage of teams and games, both in digital and print formats.
The executive editor of The Times, Joe Kahn, and the deputy managing editor, Monica Drake, described the modification to the newsroom 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 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 closure of The Times’ sports department, which employed more than 35 journalists and editors, is a significant shift for the publication.
The department’s coverage of games, sportsmen, and club owners, particularly its Sports of the Times section, was once a cornerstone of American sports journalism.
The part featured important moments and characters in American sports throughout the last century, such as Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball, and the lethal impact of concussions in the National Football League.
