Removing the sports section is tantamount to self mutilation

By Alex P. Vidal

“The Lord taught me to love everybody, but the last ones I learned to love were the sportswriters.”—Alvin Dark

THE news came as a shock to a sportswriter like me, but I don’t believe The New York Times will totally discard the most friendly and exciting department in any modern newspaper: the sports section.

I personally have not seen or read a newspaper of general circulation that doesn’t have a sports section. All the past newspapers—regional and national—that I have been privileged to be part of either as correspondent or regular staff, had voluminous stories about sports, thus the need for a sports section wasn’t only mandatory, but inexorably indispensable.

Even the first printed news sheets widely circulated in Venice, Italy in 1566, modern newspapers like the Acta diurna (“daily acts”) of The Glory That Was Rome, already chronicled the Olympic Games in The Ancient That Was Greece.

Sports is the only section that brings daily excitement and real thrill to the readers since all the competitions and rivalries are governed by rules and oath of sportsmanship; and they provide the perfect repose and succor from news about violence, celluloid intrigues, political and business disputes.

Even in campus journalism during our years in the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), the relevance and materiality of sports section was paramount.

Delisting this major artery in any publication is tantamount to self mutilation. It’s like having a kitchen without a stove.

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It was reported that The New York Times was planning to disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.

“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,”

Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on July 10 morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

They described the change to the newsroom as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”

As confirmed by writers Katie Robertson and John Koblin, the shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 reporters and editors, “is a major shift for The Times.”

“The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of The Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism,” Robertson and Koblin wrote.

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They said the section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The move reportedly represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.

The staff of The Athletic will now provide the bulk of the coverage of sporting events, athletes and leagues for Times readers and, for the first time, articles from The Athletic will appear in The Times’s print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic, which is operated separately from the Times newsroom, is included for those who subscribe to The Times’s bundle of products, added Robertson and Koblin.

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“Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom and no layoffs were planned, Mr. Kahn and Ms. Drake said. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The moves are expected to be completed by the fall,” they added.

According to Robertson and Koblin, when The Times bought The Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a broader audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes the main Times news site as well as Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service and Games.

They wrote that “as a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)