7 ms·

The New York Times to disband its sports department

47 points by jaredwiener 3y ago

fullshark 3y ago
Seems like there will inevitably end up being only two national news papers behind paywalls, The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ. I guess the Post as Bezos's plaything might survive for a while but what's the value add going to be v. the Times? Edit: I bring this up not to derail the thread, but because the Athletic is a national sports news play, seems like the NY Times's end goal is to be the national news source.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  The problem with modern capitalism is that it doesn't actually incentivise the production of value, but of monetization. News, _especially_ investigative journalism, produces value but is hard to have a moat around and monetise (this is true too of basic science). Whereas Twitter or Facebook or Reddit really don't provide much that a rival couldn't except for that fact that they already exist and people use them and the network effect is near insurmountable (Threads is not a counter argument), but because of that they are better at monetising. Solving this fundamental commons issue is what is needed because otherwise all the effort will be spent hunting for walled gardens and not actually producing value.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Are Twitter and Reddit actually good at monetizing? Both have utility, but I don't think of either as particularly successful on the financial aspect of their businesses.
    - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
      They were looking good for monetizing, until the users, the ones who make the platforms valuable, screwed it up for them.
  - afavour 3y ago
    I've always assumed that's why NYT has spent a ton of money building out its cooking and gaming verticals (including buying Wordle). They can basically subsidize the news operation/the bundle can bring in more readers than news would alone. FWIW this isn't a modern phenomenon: until the internet came along hard news was heavily subsidized by classified ads.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    How is Threads not a counter argument? Its clearly a counter argument. Twitter has shown great weakness, and something good is coming in, with the marketing muscle and thoughtful support of certain features that are well positioned, breaking Twitters moat. I suspect if Twitter wasn't perceived as going "down hill" in the first place, Threads wouldn't exist.
    - Pet_Ant 3y ago
      Threads is not a counter-argument because it's only working because it has Meta/FaceBook/Instagram and their existing network backing. It's not an unknown player simply offering a better mousetrap.
- delfinom 3y ago
  You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. They've also were spamming basically anything as "Breaking News" for awhile that I had to block all notifications for the app. I've generally found WaPo to be a bit more pleasant.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.
    - antigonemerlin 3y ago
      God bless the good reporters who put a one paragraph article into one paragraph, unlike some reporters who insist on stretching it out into an entire essay that says nothing. And they use bullet points! Bullet points! Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
      - jjtheblunt 3y ago
        Axios is (i think) unreadable in that way
    - goodbyesf 3y ago
      > I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.
- ahstilde 3y ago
  why is that inevitable?
  - fullshark 3y ago
    Don't think the market can support multiple newspapers behind paywalls, the leaders will take control with better coverage + features and the differentiator will be the editorial slant.
  - Analemma_ 3y ago
    Most markets with zero distribution and switching costs are winner-take-all. The only reason newspapers were regional to begin with was that it cost a lot of money to print and ship them, once the Internet made that stop being true, the natural equilibrium was toward only a few large papers and the rest dying off.
    - DaveExeter 3y ago
      That's not it. Newspapers used to have a monopoly on advertising, at least in the local area. Once they lost their monopoly they were no longer financially viable.
      - massysett 3y ago
        They never had a monopoly: direct mail, billboards, Yellow Pages, TV, radio, leaflets…
        DaveExeter 3y ago
        The local movie theatre wasn't going to be advertising show times anywhere but it the newspaper! If you wanted to sell a car, or fill a job opening, or rent out an apartment, you needed to advertise in the classifieds.
        massysett 3y ago
        There were classifieds other than the daily paper. All around town were newspaper boxes with ads for cars, apartments, and jobs. There were also weekly papers with classifieds. Even during the time when towns had just one daily paper, this paper did not have a monopoly on nearly any form of advertising.
- synetic 3y ago
  What is the definition of left leaning as it pertains to a newspaper? Is this an impression you have or is there a roughly objective criterion that the NYT meets to called left leaning?
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    That's always going to be a subjective metric, but the general consensus, including my own perspective, is that NYT is a traditionally liberal (so slightly left leaning) paper.
    - theironhammer 3y ago
      Left on Identity politics, right on economics. In USA it's all neoliberalism. There is really no Left.
    - orwin 3y ago
      And to most Europeans, liberals are center-right. Center-left is socdem and part of the green (the bicycle part), then you have socialists/radical greens (both part of the 'radical left' but still like or at least tolerate representative democracy, they mostly want technical solutions for 'better vote'), then you have the far left/revolutionary left, two branches, one based on trotskism, one on anarchism, mostly Jaques Decoeur, Emma Goldman as an ideological pivot from 'regular' Marxism
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    The most recent Republican candidate they endorsed for president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_election_endorsements_made_by_The_New_York_Times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
    - Kye 3y ago
      The Republican party is only right in the sense that they've gone over the edge, and the Democrats have chosen to stop short of it. We don't really have a left with meaningful power in the US unless you bulldoze the traditional meaning of left and build a shopping center over it. What we have is a nationalist party and a neoliberal party domestically. Every so often a member of one will realize this and move over to the party that aligns with their views. Both are nationalist when it comes to geopolitics.
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ Neither are left or right. They are both serve the interest of the same ambidextrous elite. Also, in the internet era, all newspapers are 'national' ( or even 'international' ) since they are all equally accessible by the population via their news feeds. All news essentially has national or global distribution now.
  - fullshark 3y ago
    Populist papers will be in front of paywalls.
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      Breitbart and Jacobin confirm this statement.
      - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
        [dead]
  - gowld 3y ago
    The establishment has left and right wings. You may have notices, for example, US Congress (and most others), which literally has seating in two parts, a left wing and right wing.
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      Both sides of established power uphold the capitalist status quo. While they'll fight over culture war nonsense, they agree more often than not. As it stands, the USA cannot build things like a universal healthcare system or significantly reduce military spending, because the most powerful people in the USA benefit from the status quo (and those in Congress listen to those powerful people more than the rest of us, giving them more power). So, sure, Congress and media outlets have a left and right, but they largely serve as boundaries as to what is considered the "acceptable" range of ideas. Noam Chomsky explores the idea well in Manufacturing Consent (both in the book and in the documentary).
- ramraj07 3y ago
  From Outside of this weird polarization/persecution fetish bubble a lot of Americans seem to be in, the nytimes seems to be doing a decent job trying to be centrist with a left tinge. If it looks too leftist, consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end. I think the pandemic played a big number on entitled people suddenly being asked to do things out of their choice and obey rules everyone else is subjected to, and polarize them against socialist ideals than before.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    > consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end Putting off the New York Times specifically for a moment, this is a "no true scotsman" fallacy. Example: "The New York Times is not that left-wing, and all centrists realize this." "Many centrists think they are getting more left-wing." "No true centrist would think that, therefore, they aren't centrists."
    - asfgisroshnio 3y ago
      "Beef is not vegan, and all vegans realize this." "Many vegans think it is vegan." "No true vegan would think that, therefore, they aren't vegans." No True Scotsman is about a particular form of reasoning, not any sentence that includes the word "true". It's a form of ad-hoc rationalization where someone rejects counterexamples out of hand. ramraj07 wasn't really making a generalization, and the rejection of the "counterexample" was neither ad-hoc nor unjustified. Many people outside the U.S. have always viewed the American "left" as right-wing, and this is justified because American politics actually are right-wing compared to much of the world.
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      It’s not exactly rocket science to substantiate my position. Nyt regularly publishes opinion pieces from quite right wing people. Their editorial stance also often call out clearly problematic extreme left views (like Lea Thomas controversy).
elijaht 3y ago
The Athletic recently laid off staff too, right?
- hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
  Yes. https://apnews.com/article/athletic-journalists-layoffs-new-york-times-dc19421672246328a58fcd2c856a8e7f https://apnews.com/article/athletic-journalists-layoffs-new-...
tivert 3y ago
The meat: > 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. > ... > 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 $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 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’s 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’s bundle of products. > ... > 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. > ... > In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared. Besides the organization changes, the main effect of this seems like it will push sports coverage out of the basic subscription level ($17/month) and into higher-tier plan ($25/month).
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Doesn't seem that crazy, consolidation etc, and they have been slowly pushing The Athletic on their main social accounts and stuff (which is a bit annoying, if I wanted The Athletic, I'd follow The Athletic) But what's interesting is how Athletic will become the print Sports page content provider too? Does The Athletic even cover like sports 'games'? Always thought of it as a longread/blog site. Like, don't expect The Athletic to cover how a playoff game went last night or whatever.
Tiktaalik 3y ago
This feels extremely dire for the greater journalism industry man whoo boy. If sports is not making money... yikes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
readonthegoapp 3y ago
The Times' sports journalism is/was the ish. It was basically the best reporting you could find on sports, which i guess makes sense. One of the things i liked about it was that it was actually detached, somewhat objective -- the Athletic has said they are PR for the teams they cover -- that's not me saying it, that's them. Whenever i stumble on an Athletic article, i'll be reading it and then be like...wait, this sucks, this must be from the Athletic, then maybe grudingly finish it. If i was a paying subscriber i'd be unhappy about this. sports is not just sports. welp. ... https://archive.ph/AfXbq https://archive.ph/AfXbq ... reminds me of corey doctorow's use of the term enshittification.
alejohausner 3y ago
Good riddance! I got tired of opening the sports section to find another story about how violent athletes are to their spouses, or how unfair high schools are to transgender women. It seemed like the writers were more concerned about signaling their virtuous views of social issues, laundering their own privileged backgrounds by pretending to care. Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. It is about contention, about struggle. As George Orwell put it, "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Sports writing is, in fact, about whatever the writer wants it to be about. I’m not sure Orwell is the authority on sports writing that you think he is, but on the other hand, now we know what you think about sports. My only question is why you’d have a relevant opinion on an institution you hate but on the other hand, everyone is entitled to an opinion. Why not skip reading the sports section? (Is your complaint more about the cultural influence than the act of reading it?)
- dangus 3y ago
  > Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. Yeah, you’re just factually wrong. Figures like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, all the way up to Kolin Kaepernick and Brittney Griner[1] are wrapped up in human rights and social issues. There isn’t some kind of magical barrier between sports and real life. It’s a social activity that takes place within wider society. To millions of fans, players are influential voices. You can be as sports-macho and anti-woke as you want but that won’t bring you closer to truth and understanding. [1] who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state.
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    > Who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state. She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.
mildavw 3y ago
Damn. I haven’t read much of The Athletic (don’t have that subscription level) but I’ve enjoyed NYT sports coverage for forever. They always seemed to have interesting, subtle, and original takes on whatever they were covering. More “literary” than your typical ESPN or other major network coverage.
- klooney 3y ago
  The Athletic does really good work, both on the beat level and for higher level analysis stuff.
- compsciphd 3y ago
  as someone who moved from dc to nyc in the 90s, i found the nyt sports page to be terrible relative to the wapo. one can compare how many national sports reporter/commentators (or even who have become bigger names in harder news) have come out of the wapo sports dept vs the nyt.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xhkkffbf 3y ago
This is also kind of a union maneuver. They push sportsball news into a different corporation with a different union. They'll bring over a few articles about the Yankees to keep the subscribers happy but the net result will be fewer reporters under the News Guild contract.
shaftoe444 3y ago
Would have assumed sports pages are something that subsidises the rest of the paper. Only time I buy an actual newspaper is for sports coverage.

47 points by jaredwiener 3y ago

Seems like there will inevitably end up being only two national news papers behind paywalls, The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ. I guess the Post as Bezos's plaything might survive for a while but what's the value add going to be v. the Times? Edit: I bring this up not to derail the thread, but because the Athletic is a national sports news play, seems like the NY Times's end goal is to be the national news source.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
The problem with modern capitalism is that it doesn't actually incentivise the production of value, but of monetization. News, _especially_ investigative journalism, produces value but is hard to have a moat around and monetise (this is true too of basic science). Whereas Twitter or Facebook or Reddit really don't provide much that a rival couldn't except for that fact that they already exist and people use them and the network effect is near insurmountable (Threads is not a counter argument), but because of that they are better at monetising. Solving this fundamental commons issue is what is needed because otherwise all the effort will be spent hunting for walled gardens and not actually producing value.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Are Twitter and Reddit actually good at monetizing? Both have utility, but I don't think of either as particularly successful on the financial aspect of their businesses.
  - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
    They were looking good for monetizing, until the users, the ones who make the platforms valuable, screwed it up for them.
- afavour 3y ago
  I've always assumed that's why NYT has spent a ton of money building out its cooking and gaming verticals (including buying Wordle). They can basically subsidize the news operation/the bundle can bring in more readers than news would alone. FWIW this isn't a modern phenomenon: until the internet came along hard news was heavily subsidized by classified ads.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  How is Threads not a counter argument? Its clearly a counter argument. Twitter has shown great weakness, and something good is coming in, with the marketing muscle and thoughtful support of certain features that are well positioned, breaking Twitters moat. I suspect if Twitter wasn't perceived as going "down hill" in the first place, Threads wouldn't exist.
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
    Threads is not a counter-argument because it's only working because it has Meta/FaceBook/Instagram and their existing network backing. It's not an unknown player simply offering a better mousetrap.
delfinom 3y ago
You know, I subscribe to the NYT but they've been pushing more and more opinion articles to the top that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers. Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly. They've also were spamming basically anything as "Breaking News" for awhile that I had to block all notifications for the app. I've generally found WaPo to be a bit more pleasant.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  I subscribed for a good while to both Wall Street Journal and New York Times, because it was very entertaining to watch how clearly biased they both were, and how conniving the presentation of seeming propaganda benefiting the two main parties was. Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.
  - antigonemerlin 3y ago
    God bless the good reporters who put a one paragraph article into one paragraph, unlike some reporters who insist on stretching it out into an entire essay that says nothing. And they use bullet points! Bullet points! Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      Axios is (i think) unreadable in that way
  - goodbyesf 3y ago
    > I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed. That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.
ahstilde 3y ago
why is that inevitable?
- fullshark 3y ago
  Don't think the market can support multiple newspapers behind paywalls, the leaders will take control with better coverage + features and the differentiator will be the editorial slant.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  Most markets with zero distribution and switching costs are winner-take-all. The only reason newspapers were regional to begin with was that it cost a lot of money to print and ship them, once the Internet made that stop being true, the natural equilibrium was toward only a few large papers and the rest dying off.
  - DaveExeter 3y ago
    That's not it. Newspapers used to have a monopoly on advertising, at least in the local area. Once they lost their monopoly they were no longer financially viable.
    - massysett 3y ago
      They never had a monopoly: direct mail, billboards, Yellow Pages, TV, radio, leaflets…
      - DaveExeter 3y ago
        The local movie theatre wasn't going to be advertising show times anywhere but it the newspaper! If you wanted to sell a car, or fill a job opening, or rent out an apartment, you needed to advertise in the classifieds.
        massysett 3y ago
        There were classifieds other than the daily paper. All around town were newspaper boxes with ads for cars, apartments, and jobs. There were also weekly papers with classifieds. Even during the time when towns had just one daily paper, this paper did not have a monopoly on nearly any form of advertising.
synetic 3y ago
What is the definition of left leaning as it pertains to a newspaper? Is this an impression you have or is there a roughly objective criterion that the NYT meets to called left leaning?
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  That's always going to be a subjective metric, but the general consensus, including my own perspective, is that NYT is a traditionally liberal (so slightly left leaning) paper.
  - theironhammer 3y ago
    Left on Identity politics, right on economics. In USA it's all neoliberalism. There is really no Left.
  - orwin 3y ago
    And to most Europeans, liberals are center-right. Center-left is socdem and part of the green (the bicycle part), then you have socialists/radical greens (both part of the 'radical left' but still like or at least tolerate representative democracy, they mostly want technical solutions for 'better vote'), then you have the far left/revolutionary left, two branches, one based on trotskism, one on anarchism, mostly Jaques Decoeur, Emma Goldman as an ideological pivot from 'regular' Marxism
- willcipriano 3y ago
  The most recent Republican candidate they endorsed for president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_election_endorsements_made_by_The_New_York_Times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
  - Kye 3y ago
    The Republican party is only right in the sense that they've gone over the edge, and the Democrats have chosen to stop short of it. We don't really have a left with meaningful power in the US unless you bulldoze the traditional meaning of left and build a shopping center over it. What we have is a nationalist party and a neoliberal party domestically. Every so often a member of one will realize this and move over to the party that aligns with their views. Both are nationalist when it comes to geopolitics.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> The left leaning NY times, and the right leaning WSJ Neither are left or right. They are both serve the interest of the same ambidextrous elite. Also, in the internet era, all newspapers are 'national' ( or even 'international' ) since they are all equally accessible by the population via their news feeds. All news essentially has national or global distribution now.
- fullshark 3y ago
  Populist papers will be in front of paywalls.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    Breitbart and Jacobin confirm this statement.
    - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
      [dead]
- gowld 3y ago
  The establishment has left and right wings. You may have notices, for example, US Congress (and most others), which literally has seating in two parts, a left wing and right wing.
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    Both sides of established power uphold the capitalist status quo. While they'll fight over culture war nonsense, they agree more often than not. As it stands, the USA cannot build things like a universal healthcare system or significantly reduce military spending, because the most powerful people in the USA benefit from the status quo (and those in Congress listen to those powerful people more than the rest of us, giving them more power). So, sure, Congress and media outlets have a left and right, but they largely serve as boundaries as to what is considered the "acceptable" range of ideas. Noam Chomsky explores the idea well in Manufacturing Consent (both in the book and in the documentary).
ramraj07 3y ago
From Outside of this weird polarization/persecution fetish bubble a lot of Americans seem to be in, the nytimes seems to be doing a decent job trying to be centrist with a left tinge. If it looks too leftist, consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end. I think the pandemic played a big number on entitled people suddenly being asked to do things out of their choice and obey rules everyone else is subjected to, and polarize them against socialist ideals than before.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  > consider for a moment that you might be the one who’s starting to fall too far off on the right end Putting off the New York Times specifically for a moment, this is a "no true scotsman" fallacy. Example: "The New York Times is not that left-wing, and all centrists realize this." "Many centrists think they are getting more left-wing." "No true centrist would think that, therefore, they aren't centrists."
  - asfgisroshnio 3y ago
    "Beef is not vegan, and all vegans realize this." "Many vegans think it is vegan." "No true vegan would think that, therefore, they aren't vegans." No True Scotsman is about a particular form of reasoning, not any sentence that includes the word "true". It's a form of ad-hoc rationalization where someone rejects counterexamples out of hand. ramraj07 wasn't really making a generalization, and the rejection of the "counterexample" was neither ad-hoc nor unjustified. Many people outside the U.S. have always viewed the American "left" as right-wing, and this is justified because American politics actually are right-wing compared to much of the world.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    It’s not exactly rocket science to substantiate my position. Nyt regularly publishes opinion pieces from quite right wing people. Their editorial stance also often call out clearly problematic extreme left views (like Lea Thomas controversy).

elijaht 3y ago

The Athletic recently laid off staff too, right?

hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
Yes. https://apnews.com/article/athletic-journalists-layoffs-new-york-times-dc19421672246328a58fcd2c856a8e7f https://apnews.com/article/athletic-journalists-layoffs-new-...

tivert 3y ago

The meat: > 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. > ... > 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 $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 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’s 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’s bundle of products. > ... > 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. > ... > In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared. Besides the organization changes, the main effect of this seems like it will push sports coverage out of the basic subscription level ($17/month) and into higher-tier plan ($25/month).

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Doesn't seem that crazy, consolidation etc, and they have been slowly pushing The Athletic on their main social accounts and stuff (which is a bit annoying, if I wanted The Athletic, I'd follow The Athletic) But what's interesting is how Athletic will become the print Sports page content provider too? Does The Athletic even cover like sports 'games'? Always thought of it as a longread/blog site. Like, don't expect The Athletic to cover how a playoff game went last night or whatever.

Tiktaalik 3y ago

This feels extremely dire for the greater journalism industry man whoo boy. If sports is not making money... yikes.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

readonthegoapp 3y ago

The Times' sports journalism is/was the ish. It was basically the best reporting you could find on sports, which i guess makes sense. One of the things i liked about it was that it was actually detached, somewhat objective -- the Athletic has said they are PR for the teams they cover -- that's not me saying it, that's them. Whenever i stumble on an Athletic article, i'll be reading it and then be like...wait, this sucks, this must be from the Athletic, then maybe grudingly finish it. If i was a paying subscriber i'd be unhappy about this. sports is not just sports. welp. ... https://archive.ph/AfXbq https://archive.ph/AfXbq ... reminds me of corey doctorow's use of the term enshittification.

alejohausner 3y ago

Good riddance! I got tired of opening the sports section to find another story about how violent athletes are to their spouses, or how unfair high schools are to transgender women. It seemed like the writers were more concerned about signaling their virtuous views of social issues, laundering their own privileged backgrounds by pretending to care. Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. It is about contention, about struggle. As George Orwell put it, "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."

singleshot_ 3y ago
Sports writing is, in fact, about whatever the writer wants it to be about. I’m not sure Orwell is the authority on sports writing that you think he is, but on the other hand, now we know what you think about sports. My only question is why you’d have a relevant opinion on an institution you hate but on the other hand, everyone is entitled to an opinion. Why not skip reading the sports section? (Is your complaint more about the cultural influence than the act of reading it?)
dangus 3y ago
> Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. Yeah, you’re just factually wrong. Figures like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, all the way up to Kolin Kaepernick and Brittney Griner[1] are wrapped up in human rights and social issues. There isn’t some kind of magical barrier between sports and real life. It’s a social activity that takes place within wider society. To millions of fans, players are influential voices. You can be as sports-macho and anti-woke as you want but that won’t bring you closer to truth and understanding. [1] who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  > Who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state. She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.

mildavw 3y ago

Damn. I haven’t read much of The Athletic (don’t have that subscription level) but I’ve enjoyed NYT sports coverage for forever. They always seemed to have interesting, subtle, and original takes on whatever they were covering. More “literary” than your typical ESPN or other major network coverage.

klooney 3y ago
The Athletic does really good work, both on the beat level and for higher level analysis stuff.
compsciphd 3y ago
as someone who moved from dc to nyc in the 90s, i found the nyt sports page to be terrible relative to the wapo. one can compare how many national sports reporter/commentators (or even who have become bigger names in harder news) have come out of the wapo sports dept vs the nyt.

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xhkkffbf 3y ago

This is also kind of a union maneuver. They push sportsball news into a different corporation with a different union. They'll bring over a few articles about the Yankees to keep the subscribers happy but the net result will be fewer reporters under the News Guild contract.

shaftoe444 3y ago

Would have assumed sports pages are something that subsidises the rest of the paper. Only time I buy an actual newspaper is for sports coverage.