The New York Times on Monday announced it was disbanding a sports department that not too long ago generated a stand-alone daily print section and produced three Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists.
The Times said it will continue to cover sports via The Athletic, a website acquired by the newspaper.
"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," Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Deputy Managing Editor Monica Drake wrote in an email sent to newsroom workers Monday morning.
"At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom's coverage of games, players, teams, and leagues."
That's a major change for a newspaper that saw Arthur Daley, Red Smith, and Dave Anderson each win a Pulitzer Prize for sports writing.
More than 35 journalists and editors, who have been working on the sports desk, will move to other roles in the newsroom. Kahn and Drake said there were no planned layoffs.
Other sections at the newspaper will add new beats covering sports.
A group of nearly 30 members of the Times' sports desk on Sunday sent a letter to Kahn and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger chastising the company for leaving its sports staff "twisting in the wind" since the purchase of The Athletic.
Sulzberger and Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien wrote an email to the staff on Monday, and said that acquiring The Athletic was to help make the newspaper "a global leader in sports journalism."
The Times bought The Athletic, which had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams, in January 2022, for $550 million.
The Athletic stories will appear in the Times' print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic is included for those who subscribe to NYTimes.com.
The Times reported The Athletic, which suffered a $7.8 million loss in the first quarter this year, has yet to turn a profit. Its number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March, 2023.
The Athletic made news in June when it laid off nearly 20 reporters and moved more than 20 others to new jobs. It was also announced the outlet would no longer assign at least one beat reporter to each sports team.
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