2023-07-10 10:28:57 ET
The New York Times ( NYSE: NYT ) is closing its own sports desk as it works to integrate its acquisition of sports site The Athletic into its daily coverage.
That closure affects more than 35 journalists on NYT Sports, and it comes after a weekend of increasing turmoil as they raised concerns about how their jobs would be affected by the paper's ongoing efforts to absorb The Athletic, the bigger sports publication for which it paid $550M in early 2022.
The New York Times Co. stock ( NYT ) was 1.1% higher early Monday.
With some 400 journalists, The Athletic was much larger than the Times' own sports desk. Layoffs aren't planned, and those on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom, management said.
The NYT added The Athletic to its subscription bundle (alongside its main news offering, Cooking, Games and The Wirecutter product reviews). It has yet to turn a profit, though NYT has grown The Athletic's paying subscribers from just over 1M to more than 3M as of March.
“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,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Deputy Managing Editor Monica Drake said in a memo to the newsroom.
“At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
On Sunday, nearly 30 members of the NYT Sports desk wrote Kahn and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger accusing the company of leaving sports staff "twisting in the wind."
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New York Times closing sports desk, focusing on The Athletic