The New York Times to disband its sports department

The New York Times said 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.

Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, announced the change 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′ newsroom on Monday morning in New York. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a major shift for the Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of the Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of the Athletic, which the Times bought in January 2022 for $US550 million ($823 million), adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.

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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’ print newspaper. Online access to the Athletic, which is operated separately from the Times newsroom, is included for those who subscribe to one or more of the Times’ bundle of products.

Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom and no layoffs were planned, Kahn and Drake said. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The moves are expected to be completed by later this year.

When the Times bought the Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a broader audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes the main Times news site as well as Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service and Games.