The decision by The New York Times to close its sports department was big news in the media industry Monday. It was big news to New Yorkers too, even those that work in other professions. Tuesday morning, Gregg Giannotti said giving control of the paper’s sports coverage to The Athletic was disappointing but understandable.
“They bought The Athletic and they basically said, we’re going to have The Athletic run our sports from now on,” he said on WFAN’s Boomer & Gio. “It was a $550 million acquisition that The New York Times had of The Athletic, and they felt like having a full sports department was redundant.”
From the Athletic’s perspective, Giannotti thinks what happened on Monday is a sort of proof of concept.
“The Athletic came in and they kind of rolled the dice. I mean, they basically spent a ton of money poaching beat writers from all over the place and paying them and beat writers from these newspapers were like, ‘Listen, I’m not going to get paid with the future newspapers. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I’m going to go with this company’ and then The New York Times ends up buying The Athletic.”
Newspapers in markets across the country are trying to figure out how to sustain themselves. Layoffs, closures and limited publishing schedules have all been the results of these businesses trying to sustain themselves with a “business as usual” approach.
Giannotti, like others in the media sphere, did lament the end of a dedicated sports department at The New York Times. He took a bit of a different tone though, because he saw reason to praise The Athletic too.
He said that what The Athletic seemed to figure out was that journalism has to be valuable to more than just the audience these days. The site was worth $550 million to The New York Times because it solved both staffing and subscription issues.
“The Athletic looks like geniuses now, because that seems to be more of the sustainable model for sportswriting than the traditional newspaper model.”
