Sixers

New York Times Disbanding Sports Department, Filling Coverage via The Athletic

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jul 10th, 2023 · 11:48 AM EDT

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Sports media news:

Breaking News: The New York Times will disband its sports department and rely on its website The Athletic for coverage of teams and games, both online and in print. Newsroom leaders said there were no planned layoffs. https://t.co/tMXXmwXa92

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 10, 2023

Similar to what NBC did in Philadelphia. There’s no longer an NBC 10 sports department, which was outsourced to sister station NBC Sports Philadelphia. You’d have Amy Fadool or Danny Pommels jump on the 6 p.m. or 11 p.m. for the sports update. Makes sense what they did here, because it was redundant to own an entire sports station and then build a separate sports staff for your news operation.

Here’s an excerpt from the NYT writeup:

The New York Times said on Monday that it would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.

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The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.

The move impacts 35 sports writers and editors, though the story goes on to say that no layoffs are expected. The NYT did recently make some cuts to The Athletic, which here in Philadelphia saw Rich Hofmann lose his job, resulting in zero remaining writers to cover the 76ers.

But regarding this move specifically – do you need a New York Times sports desk if you just bought a sports website for $550 million? No, you don’t, so you consolidate and streamline the operation to make things make sense. Seems like a pretty obvious decision on their part.