Posted: 7/10/23 at 12:12pm
The 40 current sports staffers will be offered other roles within the newsroom.
Rumors art section will be next!
Posted: 7/10/23 at 12:14pm
The arts section isn't going anywhere but thanks for playing
Posted: 7/10/23 at 12:23pm
The thing neglected to be mentioned here is that the Times isn’t eliminating sports coverage- they’re further incorporating The Athletic, which the Times acquired last year.
The Times does not have an arts and leisure equivalent to The Athletic, and cannot afford to lose pop cultural coverage. So I can’t imagine Arts and Leisure can be dropped.
Updated On: 7/10/23 at 12:23 PM
Posted: 7/10/23 at 12:27pm
BoringBoredBoard40 said: "The arts section isn't going anywhere but thanks for playing"
Yeah, I can recognize that things can change and surprise us, but I'd give it less than a 1% chance of NYT losing their arts desk.
Despite the number of sports teams here, NYC is not a sports hub. It is 100% once of the biggest art hubs in the world though.
Updated On: 7/10/23 at 12:27 PM
Posted: 7/10/23 at 12:28pm
This all happened because they acquired The Athletic, a much more robust and contemporary website that employs 400 writers. The business & finances of sports will be folded into a soon-to-be-formed area of the Business section.
To me (a person who does not read the Sports pages), this change does not seem as drastic as is currently being reported, and there is no arts/entertainment equivalent of The Athletic within the Times.
edit: appears Kad and I are on the same page.......lol
Updated On: 7/10/23 at 12:28 PM
Posted: 7/10/23 at 12:32pm
Also nobody is being laid off, which indicates there isn’t some sort of financial crunch pushing this. But it does give more incentive for the Times to paywall The Athletic further and push it as an add-on to their subscription packages (not unlike what they do with NYTimes Cooking)
Posted: 7/10/23 at 1:28pm
BETTY22 said: "The 40 current sports staffers will be offered other roles within the newsroom.
Rumors art section will be next!"
Don't be ridiculous. The Arts section is one of the few sections of the paper that still makes money --- just look at how many ads there are for movies and for theatre/music/dance. The same cannot be said for the NY Yankees, Jets, Knicks, etc.
Posted: 7/10/23 at 2:12pm
NYC is a major sports town. And, the big sports in terms of fan base nationwide is baseball, hockey, football, and basketball. If you were to combine and count the grand total New York teams in those respective sports, you would get 11 sports teams. No other city in the country has that many.
That said, a vast majority if not all sports fans don’t get their sports news from The NY Times. As someone who next to being a theatre fan is a sports fan, I can tell you that there’s better and more popular places to get sports news. The NY Times doesn’t always have the best sports coverage so I am not at all surprised that they are no longer having a sports section. It’s a section of their paper that isn’t really a big money maker.
Posted: 7/10/23 at 2:53pm
They're doing it because NYT bought The Athletic so there was a lot of overlap with both teams - there's no arts/entertainment equivalent in their portfolio at the moment. Plus arts/entertainment coverage in the NYT has national interest (along with the style section).
Posted: 7/10/23 at 3:43pm
Out here on Long Island, NEWSDAY used to be the newspaper everyone read and was home delivered. It gradually deteriorated in quality and subscriptions started to dwindle. When they dropped their arts coverage, I canceled my subscription
Now NEWSDAY's arts coverage is limited to popular movies and television. They've even dropped the weekly listing of local concerts and community theater productions.
I hope the same doesn't happen to the NYT.
Posted: 7/10/23 at 6:03pm
"That said, a vast majority if not all sports fans don’t get their sports news from The NY Times. As someone who next to being a theatre fan is a sports fan, I can tell you that there’s better and more popular places to get sports news. The NY Times doesn’t always have the best sports coverage so I am not at all surprised that they are no longer having a sports section."
I know people on this board hate the NY Post politically, but their sports section is pretty good and definitely better than NY Times. That being said, I think the really rabid sports fans get their news online from the likes of ESPN, FS1, Sports Illustrated and many others. The "arts and leisure" section of NY Times is fantastic, and I can't imagine it being shut down.
Posted: 7/10/23 at 8:06pm
BETTY22 said: "The 40 current sports staffers will be offered other roles within the newsroom.
Rumors art section will be next!"
A&L is not going anywhere...Nope not happening! Rumors from where!?!?!?
Posted: 7/10/23 at 11:54pm
"A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections." There will be someone in the Styles section covering Sports? The Arts section?
Posted: 7/11/23 at 12:23am
It's not the first time - once you're in at the gray lady people get moved around to different departments. The current Vows/Styles reporter came from the sports desk...
Posted: 7/11/23 at 2:40pm
I'd rather see the Times get rid of the message boards, which seem to be dominated by the rightwingers screaming "Woke!" at everything and the pop culture-hating Upper West Side tenured college professor types who seem to hate all contemporary theater.
