Lessons From the End of Newspaper Sports Coverage

Why the bell is tolling for us all

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

A couple of announcements last week have brought home the scale of what we might have missed from watching it build in slow motion: local newspaper sports coverage is coming to an end.

First came the Los Angeles Times saying that it would no longer publish game stories, standings, box scores, TV listings or a daily sports calendar. (The paper had already given up having a beat reporter on the two local NHL teams or the local Major League Soccer team.) The next day, the New York Times summarily dissolved its own sports department, reassigning its staff in an uncharacteristically brutal fashion, and replacing much of its coverage with national reporting from The Athletic, which the Times purchased last year, and where it is also trimming staff to reduce losses.

It's worth taking a look at why this is happening, because the changes have implications—and causes—well beyond sports reporting.

The tyranny of an early deadline

The latest moves in LA were attributed to changes in where the paper is printed, thus moving up its daily press deadline to 3:00pm. A mid-afternoon deadline, of course, ruled out game stories for games that had not begun (or certainly hadn’t ended) or standings for games that hadn’t yet been played. As 3:00 in LA is 6:00 in the East, this doesn’t have quite the same effect on coverage of politics out of Washington or markets in New York.

But such a move will also, necessarily, play havoc on the coverage of local news generally. If something happens at 4:00 on a Monday afternoon in the Hollywood strikes or at LA City Hall, the print Times won’t be able to report them until Wednesday. It’s hard to imagine many people really interested in such news who would want to depend on the paper as their source of it.

The earlier print deadlines are a reflection of lower circulation (119,000 daily for the Times as of March, down 17% in just the last year), which raises the average cost of producing and distributing each copy, forcing cost saving moves such as fewer and cheaper printing sites. The vicious cycle continues with moves like the recent sports changes, effectively shrinking the size of the candy bar. You can count on those circulation declines, which are close to the industry average, continuing. (No matter who owns the paper.)

As the moves at the New York Times illustrate, however, the problems and impacts are by no means confined to legacy print operations.

Local no more

First, for all of our worry and attention to local news— worry that is surely justified, and attention that must be paid—an increasing amount of the news is nationalized, and sports is very much included. New York Times Co. management decided to invest in sports, paying more than a half billion dollars for The Athletic, but the investment was in sports for a national and global audience.

The Mets and Yankees beat reporters for the Times were more or less writing about the teams for a local audience, perhaps a bit less so than historically, but still in large part. Their replacements at the Athletic have always taken a national view, significantly informed by the explosion in sports gambling. This trend toward nationalization has been reinforced by both social media and video streaming, both of which facilitate the ability of my fellow Yankee fan long resident in Austin to follow his childhood team directly and often in real time, while my former colleagues in New York indulge their passion for the Red Sox and Dodgers, with whom they also fell in love when young. The move of sports leagues themselves into game reporting online contributes as well.

More parochially, not only does the Times continue its steady shift away from its own home town, it seeks increasingly to move in on the turf of local publishers across the country who have regarded sports as primarily a home-teams story, and an essential element of their package.

None of this is the product of malevolence, nor is it anybody’s fault in particular. But the effects are to tighten the vise gripping newspaper publishers who still need print ad revenues but can’t sustain the product that delivers them, and to further undermine local news, even as we increasingly recognize how much as lost when it is threatened. Even if you don’t care which way the balls bounce, that should concern you.