So the suicide watch for newspapers goes on. The New York Times is shutting down its sports section and the Los Angeles Times essentially is doing the same, transitioning away from game stories and team beat coverage to a so-called “magazine” format.
It’s just sports, yes. But as Mark McDonald, one of the countless accomplished ink-stained wretches I have known during a half-century of sportswriting, asked in a Facebook post, “How can you credibly call yourself a first-rate newspaper if you have no Sports section, no baseball standings, no NFL schedule, no Final Four bracket?”
So it’s only sports, and many a condescending newsside reporter has dismissed those of us on the fun-and-games beat as futzing around in the “toy department.” But, to paraphrase the French-born American historian Jacques Barzun, who in the 1950s specifically cited baseball, “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn” its sports. Because everything in our culture is there in the sports pages: Fair play, competitiveness, illegal drugs, big business, gender equity, race, obsessive attention to celebrity, entertainment, escape.
Yet somehow the New York Times, though sticking with its famous “All The News That’s Fit to Print” slogan, won’t include a sports section anymore, off-loading sports coverage to The Athletic website it purchased last year. George Vecsey, among the most eloquent in a long line of former Times columnists, wrote on his website that the paper’s readers “feel there is a hole in their lives.”
Former sports columnist Mark Whicker, in a post on The Morning After, noted that “once those connections [to the sports section] are severed, fans just walk away. They don’t tell newspapers they are leaving. They’re just gone.
“It’s just another chapter,” he wrote, “in the way newspapers have innovated their way into obsolescence and irrelevance.”
This is a program that was already in progress, of course. Between 2019 and mid-2022, an average of two U.S. newspapers disappeared every week, and a Northwestern University study has estimated that, over the next two years, a third of the nation’s papers will cease to exist.
At Long Island’s Newsday, where I enjoyed full-time employment as a sports reporter for 44 years and continue to do some freelance work, circulation has plummeted from around 600,000 at the start of the century to roughly 97,000 now. Newsday still prints a sports section, but it no longer staffs the Olympics, World Cup soccer, major golf tournaments, Wimbledon tennis, college bowl games or far-flung NCAA basketball tournament games.
The drastic loss of advertising in the digital age has hollowed out budgets that used to support reporters’ travel to teams’ away games. And impossibly early deadlines—so many papers have dispensed with their own printing presses and outsourced that job—leave the likes of Newsday always a full day behind with final scores and other sports-related information. Radio, television and on-line bulletins—if not nearly as in-depth, analytical or evocative as on-site print reporting has been—is immediate.
And the less a sports staff gives readers, the fewer readers they have.
As a business decision, Tom Jones of the media research organization Poynter reminded that the Times is a union shop and The Athletic is not; so, while the 40 or so members of the Times sports staff reportedly are to be moved to other departments, the shuttering of sports could be a workaround: No need to fire anybody in anticipation that some will leave voluntarily.
Which sounds like another nail in the newspaper coffin. “Media news,” Bruce Arthur wrote in the Toronto Star, “has long been like climate-change news in that there is a lot of it, but very little that doesn’t feel like the first or second reel of a disaster movie.”
From here, it just feels like there won’t be any more sportswriting heroes—from such celebrated names as Frank Deford or Dan Jenkins, Roy Blount Jr. or Robert Lipsyte, Dave Anderson or Roger Angell, to the parade of committed, talented colleagues and fellow travelers who inspired and challenged me.
As Deford put it in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in 50 years “no one will appreciate what sportswriting was really like at its apogee. I fear all you’d know would be blogs and/or statistics—the pole dancing of sports journalism.”
Sure, there’ll be ESPN. But that doesn’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that makes you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote, with ESPN “there’s no poetry in its soul.”
I wish I were as optimistic as Dave Kindred, another giant in the business, who responded to the Times news with: “We shall Quixote on, always have, putting words in print, wherever we can, however we can, from cave walls to Substack to whatever’s next.”
Cave walls. There’s an image of how modern newspaper executives think of sports reporting.