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The New York Times is disbanding its sports department, a team of more than 35 journalists and editors. For both online and print, the paper will instead rely on sports coverage from The Athletic, which the New York Times bought for $550 million in January 2022.
The decision from The Times marks “an evolution in how we cover sports,” executive editor Joe Kahn and deputy managing editor Monica Drake wrote in an email Monday to staffers.
Members of the New York Times Guild said in a statement late Monday afternoon they “will fight this flagrant attempt at union-busting with every tool we have.”
“Times leadership is attempting to outsource union jobs on our sports desk to a non-union Times subsidiary under the preposterous argument that The Times can ‘subcontract’ its sports coverage to itself,” the statement NYT Guild members read.
“Management gave the Guild virtually no notice of this change. Many members learned of the company’s decision in a Times news alert that popped up on our phones minutes into a meeting called to inform sports staff of our department’s dissolution.”
No layoffs are planned for the Times, as employees from its sports department will instead move to other departments at the company.
“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 internal email. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The Athletic laid off about 20 journalists last month to reorganize its newsroom. The Athletic is not unionized, but a union represents the Times’ newsroom. The New York Times publisher A.G Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said Monday that since its acquisition 18 months ago, The Athletic has had “meaningful growth” in terms of “audience, revenue and number of subscribers with paid access.”
“We intend to utilize The Athletic — which has among the largest sports newsrooms in the world — to provide Times readers with a greater abundance of sports coverage than ever before,” said Sulzberger and Levien. “Under our plan, the digital homepage, newsletters, social feeds, the sports landing page and the print section will draw from even more of the approximately 150 stories The Athletic produces each day chronicling leagues, teams and players across the United States and around the globe.”
