The warning came in the New York Times. Nearly six years later, its sports department is gone, and the Athletic is here to stay.
On Monday, the Times announced it was disbanding its sports department and would now rely on The Athletic, which it had purchased in January 2022 for $550 million.
The warning could be found right there in black and white — and in flashing red, too, at least to those attentive to the wheezing condition of the newspaper industry — in the New York Times on Oct. 23, 2017.
“By the time you finish reading this article,” wrote reporter Kevin Draper in the ominous story’s opening paragraph, “the upstart sports news outlet called The Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper. In a couple of years, once The Athletic has completed its breakneck expansion, perhaps that newspaper’s sports section will no longer exist.”
Draper then quoted The Athletic co-founder Alex Mather, whose words were tinged with cartoon-villain smarm then. Today, their only notable attribute is — well, the smarm, still, and brutal irony.
“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” said Mather, his words oozing across the page. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”
Nearly six years later, The Athletic certainly has assured that one newspaper’s sports department will no longer exist, though in a roundabout way Mather couldn’t have fathomed then.
On Monday morning, the New York Times announced it was disbanding its sports department and would now rely on The Athletic, which it had purchased in January 2022 for $550 million.
The news came a day after the Washington Post had reported that Times sports staffers had sent a letter to A.G. Sulzberger, chairman of the New York Times Company, and executive editor Joseph Kahn requesting transparency on their status given the redundancy of the Times’s and The Athletic’s coverage.
That’s right. The sports section The Athletic killed was the one that gave space to its founders’ early boasting, in a newspaper that eventually made those founders filthy rich. I’m not sure I know the difference between unfathomable and inevitable anymore — anything seems possible, in staggering lousy ways — but I do know that this is a cruel twist, even by the standards of this industry.
Who would have figured nearly six years ago that the call would have come from inside the Old Gray Lady’s house? Who scripted that?
Times management says it will not lay off sports staffers but reassign them within the newsroom. That’s supposed to be a reassuring sentiment for the 40 or so sports staffers whose worlds were turned upside-down Monday, but would you believe it? Times management uses the word “evolution” as if its definition is, “You can stay, but it will never be as good as it was.”
Sports was never a top priority at the Times, which sometimes acts as if it has data that revealed that 63 percent of its readers wear a monocle and use it to look down on sports as the pastime of the scurvy and the unwashed.
But the Times always has had a section befitting sports’ place in American society and the Times’s quest to be the newspaper of record. Three sports columnists at the paper — Arthur Daley, Red Smith, and Dave Anderson — won Pulitzer Prizes. Sports features writer John Branch won a Pulitzer in 2013, and among talented current staffers, Tyler Kepner stood out as one of the premier baseball writers in the country.
The Times statement said the business desk will cover money and power in sports, and sports-adjacent beats will be added in other departments. The changes are expected to be implemented by the fall.
Times management also said that it will focus more on “high-impact” enterprise sports reporting. That’s probably purposefully vague, and it’s certainly ill-advised when it comes at the expense of coverage of New York/New Jersey’s professional teams, with at least two franchises in the area in MLB, the NBA, NFL, and NHL.
The Times already had eliminated beat coverage, but it was a strength, at least in terms of clever, informative feature stories, for The Athletic. It still stuns me that the New York Times does not cover the New York Yankees on a daily basis. How are relationships that lead to discovering those “high-impact” stories going to be developed if no one is around a team on a day-to-day basis?
The Athletic hasn’t been without recent drama, either. In June, it laid off 20 staffers while reducing its beat coverage and focusing more on the national picture. In retrospect, this should have been seen as one more bit of grim foreshadowing for what was to come with the Times. Maybe it was, and informed their reasoning behind the letter.
Say this for those Times sports staffers: Their reportorial instincts remain properly skeptical and sharpened, even when it came to their own rotten fate.
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