The New York Times announced it is disbanding its sports department in favor of incorporating coverage from The Athletic, the sports website that its parent company purchased 18 months ago.
In an email to the Times newsroom on Monday morning, executive editor Joe Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake called the change “an evolution in how we cover sports.”
The Times sports department currently has more than 35 journalists and editors, who will be shifted to other roles in the newsroom without any layoffs, the newspaper said.
The shift in philosophy “will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues,” according to the email, and 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.”
On Sunday, members of the sports staff sent a letter to the paper’s leadership team demanding answers about the section’s future. A day later, their questions were answered.
The New York Times Company acquired The Athletic, a subscription-based sports journalism site, in January 2022 for $550 million. At the time of the sale, CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said The Athletic would continue to exist as a “stand-alone product.”
In June, The Athletic announced layoffs amounting to nearly 4% of its newsroom, with almost 20 journalists losing their jobs and another 20 reassigned to different roles.
