The paper on Wednesday internally announced it would shut down its sports department “in its current form,” WaPo sports columnist Barry Svrluga wrote on . The Athletic reports the roughly 45-person sports team was told to remain at home Wednesday and was informed via Zoom that the department would cease operation; a small number of journalists will be reassigned.
The move folds a section that the Athletic extols as one of the country’s premier sports desks—home over the decades to figures like Shirley Povich, Thomas Boswell, Christine Brennan, Sally Jenkins, David Aldridge, and the duo of Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon—and comes as part a broader round of cuts affecting hundreds across the organization.
In its heyday, the Post was probably the nation’s best sports section. All of the luminaries you mentioned plus Tom Boswell, John Feinstein, Liz Clarke, Dave Kindred, and bunch of really talented beat writers, many of whom jumped from sports (always affectionately known at the Post as “the toy department”) to hard news. In recent years, Isabelle Khachaturyan went from covering the Caps, where her fluency in Russian helped make Alex Ovechkin interviews a lot more interesting, to reporting from Ukraine.
There’s really no good reason to subscribe to the paper any more, even as a local, and it’s a shame.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports it added more than a million on-line subscribers last year. The Times has no true in-house sports department, though, using the services of The Athletic for those stories.
Of note, Miami grad Phil Coffin is a former sports editor for the Times.
Many other sections of the paper are being gutted too. Say what you will about the gilded age robber barons, but they would at least do things like open universities, build hospitals, and fund libraries and the arts for the sake of the public. Our current crop of ultrawealthy will buy one of the largest newspapers in the country and shut down every section that isn’t turning a profit.
I have a bunch of media friends at the Post when they worked in New York; some at the NY Post (where I worked) and others at the Daily News. It’s another sad day for a business all of us who chose that world. There is nothing to take its place.
At least the NY Times owns the Athletic. Is WaPo going the AP route or using stringers. Tom Boswell was a giant.