Generally speaking, I don’t like to talk about the sports media business on the air. It’s a little too inside baseball, a bit self-reverential, and not nearly as interesting as people inside the business assume it is to anyone else. That said, there was a fair amount of outside interest when the New York Times announced this week that they would disband their sports department. Instead, the Times’ sports coverage would come from The Athletic, the sports publication The Times bought over a year ago for $400 million, an acquisition that has yet to turn a profit and employs hundreds of journalists covering a broad range of national and global sports properties. This marks the end of a run with considerable peaks for The Times, where sports rose to its own section and served as the home of some of the nation’s most prestigious columnists that covered sports beyond the pitch. The New York Times sports section maintained a different ethos than it’s Gotham contemporaries, either a badge of honor or a sign of self-righteousness, depending who you ask.
Regardless of what’s said, the decision was almost exclusively economic, serving both short- and long-term fiscal needs of the publication. It would be foolish if not impossible to maintain The Athletic as some kind of loss leader while also running an alternative, competing sports section. In essence, one of them had to go, and in this case, it’s the one that didn’t have separate earnings potential. Unlike the Times’ sports section, you have to pay extra for The Athletic, like other premium sections for the Times like the Wirecutter or cooking recipes. These premium add ons are an emerging piece of The Times’ fiscal plan, one that looks far more like a conglomerated media empire than a traditional newspaper. Which means that if you want sports from The New York Times, you’ll have to pay a little extra. Same goes if you want the best way to prepare grilled polenta for a dinner party.
With this move, New York Times management has also said they’re less interested in covering New York centric games, to the extend they did so, and more interested in a national sports perspective that includes less hard reporting and locker room access and a lot more analysis. To state the obvious, if you’re reading The New York Times for Knicks coverage, you’re in a really small minority, as most everyone has gotten all they need from somewhere free on the Internet. Also, The Athletic reporters aren’t unionized, unlike those with The Times. So current Times employees have accused them of essentially replacing a unionized labor force with a non-unionized one. Which is likely true.
I won’t speak to the Union claims, as there’s probably nothing less interesting to a listening audience than the labor dispute of someone else’s work place, assuming they’re not responsible for collecting your trash or teaching your kids. With all due respect and apologies, journalists, like academics, sometimes have an inflated sense of self-importance around their daily existence. I also won’t talk about the balance of New York centric sports coverage in The Times. Of all the news deserts in the US, and there are some big ones with dire impact, Manhattan isn’t high on the list.
What is notable, and not just at The Times, is the seismic shift in the sports media industry. Where once sports was a way to build paid engagement across an entire vertical, now it’s being asked to stand on its own – often with challenging results. It’s not that people care less about sports. We love it more than ever. It’s that we’ve got a gazillion places to get our fix and more sports tastes than a Jersey diner. Which is why ESPN went through another round of layoffs when the business has to stand on its own, unable to bank on cable subscriptions paid for by people who might only be there for the Food Network. This is the play of The New York Times, where if people want sports, and many do, they’ll have to pay for it all themselves. And no matter how many soap box sermons people want to give about what The New York Times should do, it doesn’t matter. Because in the end, journalism, especially sports journalism – if that is in fact what The Athletic is – is a business. And at the moment, one for which readers will need to pay a little bit more.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.