Whole new ball game: New York Times shuts sports department, gets Athletic subscribers

For sports fans of a certain leaning, the announcement, on Tuesday, held something of the cold-water shock of an old-fashioned newspaper scoop. The New York Times would disband its sports desk. Coverage of the city’s marquee teams – the Yankees, the Knicks, the Giants – would be turned over to The Athletic, the sports-subscription entity which the Times purchased two years ago as a distinct and separate offering. Existing Times sports’ staff would be relocated to other desks. The decision, announced John Kahn, Times executive editor, represented an “evolution in how we cover sports” with a move to focusing on “how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large” while confirming that the Times “will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues”.

On social media, colleagues empathised with staff. But the real news value was contained in the thousand-plus comments beside the Times’s own coverage of the story. Most readers expressed genuine sorrow and anger. There were frequent mentions of revered columnists such as Red Smith and Arthur Daley. The mood hearkened back to a tableau familiar from a period show like Mad Men: identically dressed commuters crouched over the sports section on the morning train.

To many, the announcement represented an abrupt and inexplicable shuttering not just of an indispensable aspect of the Times but the needless silencing of a distinct city voice that had been a familiar part of casual conversations in the five boroughs for over a century. To the publishers of the Times, the change allows the paper to expand the direction in which its sports coverage had naturally gravitated: away from the day-to-day reportage of sport and towards a deeper analysis of the issues of contemporary sport.

The reason sport is ubiquitous is because it is one of the few institutions that can bind together a very diverse people

—  Tom Farrey

Whether that transpires remains to be seen. “What is their attitude for sports?” wondered Robert Lipsyte in a conversation with the Washington Post. Lipsyte is another name associated with a roaring age for American sports writing. Famously, when sent to cover the first Ali-Liston fight in Miami, he was told by his editor to track the route from the arena to the closest hospital on the assumption that that was where the brash challenger would spend the night.

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“Is it an extension of the cultural department? Is it entertainment? Or is it an aspect of news and American life that we should be covering seriously?”

Those seem like vital questions. The presence of sport in America is ubiquitous – in the proliferation of television screens in bars and restaurants, on the TV screens, on street fashion. But the landscape of American sports coverage has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Over 2,500 newspaper titles have closed since 2005, creating a recognised ‘news desert’ across the more isolated stretches of the continent. Sports Illustrated, for decades the prince of glossy sports magazines, has been hollowed out. ESPN, just last month, announced a series of high-profile lay-offs. But there was a general belief that a foundation pillar such as the New York Times sports department was sacrosanct.

“What do I think about it?” responds Tom Farrey, the Emmy-award winning journalist with ESPN who is now a director at the Aspen Institute’s Sport and Society Program.

“I have seen this industry evolve in a number of ways. I started in newspapers when they were in their heyday. I’ve covered the NFL, the NBA when newspapers were pulling down 30 per cent profit margins. I made the jump over to the internet in 1996 with a Paul Allen company called Starwave: we’re the ones who created what became ESPN.com. We built it up and got bought out and moved to Bristol [Connecticut] and ESPN became this dominant force that threatened newspapers and sports coverage. And now ESPN is struggling. Game coverage on the internet has changed everything.

“Which is a long way of saying: these things happen. Media evolves. The bigger question is: are we going to get the type of sports coverage that the New York Times sports department has been providing for years and doing an incredible job? I would check it three or four times a day because there was such a volume of high-quality content looking at sport from all the angles – politics, gender, violence. I think there is a lot better enterprising sports sociology journalism being done now. And my understanding is that these stories do get read. And I like to think wherever that coverage exists, whether in a defined sports department which also has all of the beat writers, there will still be a demand and interest. So, I am not so sure it is the worst thing in the world. Maybe we can bring sports as a significant social institution more from the sidelines into the centre of American and political life and our global culture.”

Sports commands a curious place in American culture. The establishment and growth of its professional baseball, football and basketball leagues inadvertently served the purpose of making a geographically vast country manageable in the minds of its citizens. And sports – teams, players, last night’s game – formed an easy entry point into a billion conversations.

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“The reason sport is ubiquitous is because it is one of the few institutions that can bind together a very diverse people,” says Farrey.

“The US is the size of Europe with people from all over the world bringing their culture, their ideas. How do you integrate them? How do you find common ground and common cause, especially now that politics have become so divisive? Well, by watching and playing sport. I play beach volleyball here with a really diverse group. Including some who get all their ideas from Fox News. Well, not me. But we play together and get to see each other as decent human beings. Church-going is down. Schools are becoming smaller. The use of public parks is falling. So, sports are one of those things that bind people from a local to a national level in this country. If you are a Cowboys fan, God bless you, then you have something to talk about to the person next to you on the plane.”

In the golden age of print, syndicated sports columnists played a vital role in those conversations. Jimmy Cannon, among the most celebrated, earned the equivalent of $10,000 (€8,950) per week for his daily column in the Journal-American, multiples of the athletic stars he covered. This was the high point for print, before the age of mass television and the transference of sport to the small screen. The inception of the Athletic, in 2016, presented a new threat to beleaguered sports departments, first in America and, after the company decided to cover the Premier League, across England. The idea was simple: to replicate the way traditional newspapers covered sport by gathering local coverage under one umbrella. So, by paying for the Athletic, sports fans could get in-depth coverage of clubs as diverse as Bury FC to the Boston Bruins. But their model ignores fringe sports entirely. It was an unapologetic vulture approach to journalism.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” promised co-founder Alex Mather in 2017.

“We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

In an irony lost on nobody this week, he was speaking back then to the New York Times for a piece that appeared in the sports section under the headline: Why The Athletic Wants to Pillage Newsrooms.

The Athletic’s hiring spree of football writers across England caused a stir in 2018 and confirmed its ambition to transform sports coverage. But its survival depended on investments and a projected profitability that it was nowhere near achieving – until the New York Times bought it for $550 million last summer (twice what Jeff Bezos paid to become owner of the Washington Post). The general assumption was that the Times’ wanted the Athletic’s subscription list more than its coverage. It has three million subscribers and lost $8 million in the first quarter of this year alone.

What the Athletic represents is a different model for covering sport during a period when the consumption of American sports has changed. NBA ratings are roughly half what they were in the Michael Jordan era. Baseball ratings have been plummeting since 1992. Although he covered the elite professional teams in the NFL and NBA, Farrey was always most interested in the influence of sport at youth level. His 2008 book Game On: The All-American Race To Make Champions Of Our Children has become a classic investigation into a relentless pursuit of competitive excellence that can begin at a frighteningly young age: 14-year-olds with a decade of elite football practice behind them; five-year-old golfers shooting par, the purchasing of sperm from elite athletes in the hope of producing future Olympians or stars – and the unbalanced general outcome of placing such a heavy emphasis on winning. Now, Farrey is the director of the Aspen Institute’s Sport and Society programme, a role which has led him to contributing frequent pieces to the sports pages of the New York Times. And as he remains an avid reader of sports, he is disinclined to see this as a black day.

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“I love the newspaper days. I love the Sunday print and owe the early part of my career to the industry. But I am just not sentimental about this. There is a need for quality content and whatever platform it is on, I am agnostic about. I think the question is whether we will see this type of content. I’ll pay for it, and I know plenty of others who will. I think you just have to lean into the changes. There is no way to move this industry to a better place by constantly looking backward and agonising over the decline of an institution that has had a great run but ... has to evolve.”