The New York Times to disband its sports department
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> The New York Times said on Monday that it would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.
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> The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists 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. 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 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 one or more of The Times’s bundle of products.
> ...
> 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.
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> In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared.
Besides the organization changes, the main effect of this seems like it will push sports coverage out of the basic subscription level ($17/month) and into higher-tier plan ($25/month).
They always seemed to have interesting, subtle, and original takes on whatever they were covering. More “literary” than your typical ESPN or other major network coverage.
But what's interesting is how Athletic will become the print Sports page content provider too? Does The Athletic even cover like sports 'games'? Always thought of it as a longread/blog site. Like, don't expect The Athletic to cover how a playoff game went last night or whatever.
It was basically the best reporting you could find on sports, which i guess makes sense.
One of the things i liked about it was that it was actually detached, somewhat objective -- the Athletic has said they are PR for the teams they cover -- that's not me saying it, that's them.
Whenever i stumble on an Athletic article, i'll be reading it and then be like...wait, this sucks, this must be from the Athletic, then maybe grudingly finish it.
If i was a paying subscriber i'd be unhappy about this.
sports is not just sports. welp.
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reminds me of corey doctorow's use of the term enshittification.
If sports is not making money... yikes.
Edit: I bring this up not to derail the thread, but because the Athletic is a national sports news play, seems like the NY Times's end goal is to be the national news source.
FWIW this isn't a modern phenomenon: until the internet came along hard news was heavily subsidized by classified ads.
I suspect if Twitter wasn't perceived as going "down hill" in the first place, Threads wouldn't exist.
Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly.
They've also were spamming basically anything as "Breaking News" for awhile that I had to block all notifications for the app.
I've generally found WaPo to be a bit more pleasant.
Several months ago it got boring, and i cancelled both. I made accounts on APnews and Reuters, and it seems that the signal to noise ratio skyrocketed.
And they use bullet points! Bullet points!
Edit: Not AP News, or at least not the front facing site. Either they have redesigned it, or I can't find it anymore, but I swear to god there was a news agency site which published stories with bullet points.
That's surprising since the AP and Reuters are a major news source for wsj and nytimes. Not only that, the AP sets the style, values and agenda for the nytimes and the rest of the news media in the country while reuters does it for the news media of britain and the british colonies.
It would be interesting (in this experiment) to find two articles if different bias both based on a single feed from apnews or reuters.
When I was a kid, I used to play with my older cousins at family events. They were in high school and in wrestling programs, much bigger and stronger than me.
Inevitably in my case, and probably all across family events in America, our play eventually devolved into the “stop hitting yourself” game.
Seems that’s where we’re at now.
The opposite is true, actually: these news services are incredibly, probably overly, sensitive to what stories are driving organic traffic and which are not. They all have multiple dashboards that track site traffic minute by minute and make editorial decisions on an hourly time scale. Specifically they rewrite headlines, metadata, ledes, and add/alter keywords within copy if a story seems to be underperforming. On a daily basis they make writing assignments based on this data.
Big news services can to some extent “push” stories at the beginning, but not for long, maybe a day or two at most. They’re so dependent on traffic for the business model, and so close to the edge of not making money, that they have be acutely aware and reactive to organic traffic patterns.
I thought about it and just had to rage recently.
What is _organic traffic_ for something like the NYTimes that is a subscribtion paper and not any public ad-invested news site.
I can tell you, nobody uses the NYTimes search function to find old articles, people inherently just open up the site or app and browse what's fed to them.
Are we saying NYTimes using the X free article day to bombard paid subscribers with shitty content when subscribers generally want curated good content?
But also if NYTimes is then curating what a subscriber sees as the daily paper, why do they go and gaslight the subscribers?
Yeah. Recently I've noticed they've promoted "Opinion" over "World" in their app. World News used to be the second section after "Most Popular"; now it's 3rd, after "Games" and "Opinion. IMHO, it's a bad sign. One of the main reasons I subscribed to them was I liked their in-depth coverage of world news, specifically China, but that's gotten noticeably worse. Maybe Ukraine has sucked up all their budget for that (though for little good, IMHO those stories haven't been very informative or interesting for the last several months).
> ...that seem to really be about gaslighting their subscribers.
> Recent example, there was a opinion piece about "how people were obsessed with the rich people in the sub but not the migrants in the mediterranean" roughly. You know, completely gaslighting the fact that the readers had zero say in the coverage decisions of the NYTimes and other outlets to run the Titan sub coverage so incessantly.
I'm not sure if that's gaslighting so much as an appeal to their subscriber's smugness and outrage. I kind of feel they have a lot of subscribers who'd like to be outraged over something like that. And also feel like they'd be happy to oblige.
Newspapers used to have a monopoly on advertising, at least in the local area. Once they lost their monopoly they were no longer financially viable.
If you wanted to sell a car, or fill a job opening, or rent out an apartment, you needed to advertise in the classifieds.
Even during the time when towns had just one daily paper, this paper did not have a monopoly on nearly any form of advertising.
In USA it's all neoliberalism. There is really no Left.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
In short, NYT is only "left of" hard right wing.
Outside of the U.S. I think the NYT would be considered right of center. Same with the Democratic Party. There has been a steady rightward shift in U.S. policies since Reagan. From my perspective there is no liberal bias as such but there is a lot of rhetoric stating this. I’ve yet to see any sort of semi objective reasoning behind this belief.
At best, relative comparisons can be made.
Politics are controversial, but near universal consensus is that WSJ is right of NYT, and others are left and right of both respectively, and in between.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Accusations...
Neither are left or right. They are both serve the interest of the same ambidextrous elite.
Also, in the internet era, all newspapers are 'national' ( or even 'international' ) since they are all equally accessible by the population via their news feeds. All news essentially has national or global distribution now.
So, sure, Congress and media outlets have a left and right, but they largely serve as boundaries as to what is considered the "acceptable" range of ideas.
Noam Chomsky explores the idea well in Manufacturing Consent (both in the book and in the documentary).
However I'd take it a step further and disagree with Dr.Chomsky and argue that increasingly "the consent is not manufactured" per-se by the evil advertisers, politicians or Illuminati who are attempting to keep control; but rather I believe by Americans themselves who feel otherwise powerless in the political and capital processes. By that I mean, both a working-class black American in Detroit voting for the pro-immigration policy of the Democratic party - or a working-class white American in Detroit voting for a regressive tax policy of the Republican party is voting for policies extremely to hostile to their own economic interests.
But they do so anyways in a quasi-religious manner like the working-class of Europeans did in the 18th century prior to the Manifesto - precisely because of faith (in Christ, humility and work ethics) which gave meaning and sublimation to their otherwise horrendously and explicitly exploited livelihoods by the nobility. And this religious zeal of "humility" to one's tribe trumps even one's economic interests and gets then in terms co-opted and amplified by political, marketing consultants and the "invisible hand" of the YouTube algorithms of our 20th century - looking to capture and monetize a "demographic authenticity".
If George Orwell was alive today, he might be tickled to add the addendum to Marx's quote "religion is the opiate of the masses" (a la "all animals are equal...") to that of "religion is the opiate of the masses; some identity-based religions however are more profitable than others".
I think the pandemic played a big number on entitled people suddenly being asked to do things out of their choice and obey rules everyone else is subjected to, and polarize them against socialist ideals than before.
Putting off the New York Times specifically for a moment, this is a "no true scotsman" fallacy.
Example:
"The New York Times is not that left-wing, and all centrists realize this."
"Many centrists think they are getting more left-wing."
"No true centrist would think that, therefore, they aren't centrists."
"Many vegans think it is vegan."
"No true vegan would think that, therefore, they aren't vegans."
No True Scotsman is about a particular form of reasoning, not any sentence that includes the word "true". It's a form of ad-hoc rationalization where someone rejects counterexamples out of hand. ramraj07 wasn't really making a generalization, and the rejection of the "counterexample" was neither ad-hoc nor unjustified. Many people outside the U.S. have always viewed the American "left" as right-wing, and this is justified because American politics actually are right-wing compared to much of the world.
Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues. It is about contention, about struggle. As George Orwell put it,
"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."
Why not skip reading the sports section? (Is your complaint more about the cultural influence than the act of reading it?)
Yeah, you’re just factually wrong.
Figures like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, all the way up to Kolin Kaepernick and Brittney Griner[1] are wrapped up in human rights and social issues.
There isn’t some kind of magical barrier between sports and real life. It’s a social activity that takes place within wider society.
To millions of fans, players are influential voices.
You can be as sports-macho and anti-woke as you want but that won’t bring you closer to truth and understanding.
[1] who was definitely not jailed in Russia for drugs, let’s be real: she’s an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state.
She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.
> She was jailed for being a high-profile American, perfect bait to trade for a notorious weapons smuggler imprisoned in the US...she had played in Russia since 2014, so if anti-LGBT was the motivation, they could have grabbed her since.
Yeah, the theory that she was arrested because "an LGBT person and advocate, and Russia is an anti-LGBT mafia state," doesn't even pass the smell test. The theory says a lot more about the person who proposed it than any kind of external reality.
>> Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues.
> Yeah, you’re just factually wrong.
Well, that's a very strong statement but I think you're correct. I'd rephrase the original comment as
*Most* Sports writing isn't about human rights or social issues.
Are there better outlets for New York sports fans to read? I'm not from there, but I've gotten the impression that the New York Post might be better than the New York Times.
75% of Americans are sports fans and 48% of Americans say they follow government and public affairs most of the time. Only 10% of Americans are politically disengaged.
Over 60% of Americans voted in the 2020 election, a record high.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that over 50% of all Americans both watch sports and care at least somewhat about politics.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/300148/interest-nfl-foot...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/07/1-in-10-a...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/record-high-t...
> 75% of Americans are sports fans and 48% of Americans say they follow government and public affairs most of the time. Only 10% of Americans are politically disengaged.
> It's not out of the realm of possibility that over 50% of all Americans both watch sports and care at least somewhat about politics.
However, it's probably a true statement that "the majority of sports watchers don't care about politics [while watching sports]." I'm probably sure you could dredge up some statistic that most Americans like french fries, but that doesn't mean they'd like or even want every dish and every activity served with a side of fries.
Also, given partisan polarization, it's an error to treat the "48% of Americans say they follow government and public affairs" as a block. It's actually two more-or-less antagonistic blocks, and mixing sports and politics will be extremely distasteful to at least one of them.
Don't worry. That kind of coverage in sports will still happen:
> 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.