• by Ray Schultz , July 10, 2023

The New York Times is disbanding its sports department and will rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic.  

“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,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The Times acquired The Athletic in January 2022 for $550 million. The business reported a $7.8 million loss for the first quarter of this year, but the number of paying subscriptions now tops more than three million, up from one million at the time of the acquisition.

No layoffs are anticipated. 

On Sunday, a group of nearly 30 members of The Times’s sports desk sent a letter to Mr. Kahn and A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, chastising the company for leaving its sports staff “twisting in the wind” since the purchase of The Athletic.