Why is New York Times shutting its sports section? Exploring underlying issues at major newsroom

The New York Times is known for the saying “All the News That's Fit to Print” but the popular publication is shutting down its sports section. It was announced that the newspaper will shut down the sports section and will hand that duty to The Athletic.

The Athletic was bought by The Times last year for $550 million as the majority source of its sports coverage. The paper stated that it will offer positions elsewhere within the newsroom to sports staffers. It plans to create a new team in its business section with a focus on the business aspect of sports.

The subscription sports website recently announced that it was letting go of almost 20 reporters or around 4% of its staff. Per Ben Strauss of The Washington Post, this shift will be met with opposition from the sports staffers on The Times.

The New York Times’s executive editor, Joe Kahn, and a deputy managing editor, Monica Drake, issued a statement on the drastic move:

“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. At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The Athletic was started in 2016 and now has over three million subscribers, over double from when it was acquired by The New York Times. As mentioned in public filings by the Times, the website lost $6.8 million in February and March this year.

It suffered an additional $12.6 million in the second quarter and $7.8 million in the most recent quarter.

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The New York Times outlines its plans pertaining to the sports section

The Chairman of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger and its CEO Meredith Kopit Levien put out a letter detailing their plan with their sports section. Both explained how The Athletic will help the newspaper in growing from an online point of view:

"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."

They added:

"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."

This story is developing as we will see if any other moves will be made by The New York Times and its sports section.