Nows and Forevers

I’ve been a journalist for a long time, and an avid newspaper reader for a lot longer. I never thought I’d live to see this day, but I’m wondering if the vaunted sports section is about to take its last gasp.

The New York Times this week shut down its sports desk. The last Times written and produced sports section was published Tuesday. The reporters and editors who were assigned to the sports section are being dispersed throughout the Times, and The Athletic will take over sports coverage. The Times acquired The Athletic in 2022.

There’s a lot of history to The Times’ sports desk: Red Smith and George Vescey and a lot of other great writers passed through there. While I’m not a huge sports fan, I still perused through it because The Times had such a unique take on sports that you almost had to read their stories. Plus, for a decade or so while I covered the media, I worried about getting beaten by their great sports media reporter.

But history doesn’t mean a whole lot to newspapers these days. We used to say that we printed the names of dozens of subscribers every day on the obituary page. We as an industry, thanks to the Internet and other changes, aren’t able to replace those diehard newspaper readers.

They’re out of the habit.

I’d like to think I’ve weathered the changes in the newspaper industry since I started. It’s almost a completely different business than it was back then; it’s almost completely different than it was back in 2002, the last time I worked for a general newspaper. They’ve been supplanted by the web and social media; battered by the loss of classifieds and then display advertising and supplements; and then subjected to severe cuts and also by a brain drain. A journalistic time traveler from 1992, say, would be shocked at how few newspapers there are, how small they are, and how understaffed newsrooms are.

I first made the transition to online media in 2002, which doesn’t make me a pioneer but instead makes me prescient. I still work for a printed newspaper but we have a strong digital presence and a digital-first attitude. My opinion, you have to. The print edition is still important, thankfully. I have printer’s ink in my heart, even as I have pixels in my veins.

Or whatever the metaphor is these days.

But I have to say losing The New York Times sports page is shocking. I wonder who else will come to make this same decision. It’s a long way from the days, early in my career, where the sports department pretty much ruled the newsroom: they got their pick of pages, had a lot of reporters, and had the late deadlines because of trying to get in West Coast sports scores and such.

Now, of course, a lot of that has changed. You don’t need to go to the newspaper to find out the scores. That’s on my phone, whenever I want. Or I can have them texted to me. But I never looked at The Times for the sports scores. Even as long as I have read The Times — and I started when I was in sixth grade so it’s a long, long time — I never got the scores from there. Other newspapers, yes. But I always looked to The Times for notebook-style musings and context and standout features.

Where are those going to be in The Times now?

I like The Athletic. It has led to a revolution in sports coverage and a needed one. And I suppose both The Athletic and The New York Times Sports Section shouldn’t compete for resources within the same organization. But it makes me wonder what other things might end up going away in this latest evolution of the newspaper business.