As Sports News Desks Shrink, the Beat Is Forced to Evolve

Michael Powell, who wrote the New York Times’ “Sports of the Times” column between 2014 and 2020, used to get peppered by regional sports reporters about how to get a job at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

Since then, the New York Times disbanded its sports department, offloading coverage to the Athletic, which it acquired in 2022, and killed the seminal column that also featured star writers like Red Smith, Robert Lipsyte, Selena Roberts and John Branch. The Los Angeles Times stopped printing baseball box scores in 2023, and is reportedly down to just nine full-time sports staff writers. Earlier this month, the Washington Post shuttered its sports section as part of mass newsroom layoffs. 

“It’s like so many areas in journalism now, the ladders are missing multiple rungs,” said Powell, who also spent 10 years at the Post between 1996 and 2006 and is now a staff writer for The Atlantic. “It’s a lot more difficult if you don’t want to just do fanboy coverage or fangirl coverage.”

The Post’s decision to cut its sports desk is the latest sign of legacy outlets scaling back daily coverage of sports, a yearslong retrenchment that has provided an opening for sports-centric outlets like the Athletic and independent journalists such as Pablo Torre, a former Sports Illustrated writer and ESPN personality who now has the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” to help fill the gap. Sports teams, too, are producing shareable content, as social media users blast out clips of thunderous dunks and last-second drives that fans used to have to wait until SportsCenter to catch.

In a sense, sports junkies are spoiled for choice. But the retreat of national newspapers offers fewer avenues for journalists to cut their teeth in the industry, especially when entry-level beats like high school sports become line items in a layoff. The shift also risks robbing local audiences of in-depth and sustained coverage of their hometown heroes. 

It’s happening at a time when there’s no shortage of local sports news. Los Angeles is dealing with the downfall of Casey Wasserman and his departure from one of the largest sports agencies in the world, not to mention the ongoing controversy over his role as chairman of the LA28 Olympics committee. The FIFA World Cup kicks off in June, and the Super Bowl returns to SoFi Stadium a year from now.

So what’s the path forward? News outlets looking to compete in today’s screen-addled age, journalists and experts told TheWrap, need to meet audiences where they are and lean into original, in-depth reporting that goes well beyond the box score — the kind of work that can’t be replicated by an artificial intelligence-powered bot.

“People still want stories that are relevant to their lives and revelatory about the teams and leagues and sports they care about,” Steven Ginsberg, the executive editor of the Athletic, told TheWrap. 

Ginsberg, a former Post managing editor, leads a profitable newsroom of more than 500 journalists covering every major U.S. league, along with college sports, international soccer, Formula 1 and currently the Winter Olympics. The Athletic, like fellow digital-native outlet The Ringer, boasts several of the top 10 sports podcasts on the Spotify and Apple charts. 

“What has changed is how people get that information,” Ginsberg added. “It’s varied in all sorts of ways, whether it is video, visuals, data, interactives, audio, newsletters, short form, long form. Sometimes people just want the nugget of information, sometimes they want a 4,000-word story. I think that’s the way journalism is changing, and I think it’s incumbent upon outlets to change with fans.”

The Post’s pivot

The Washington Post has a venerable tradition of standout sportswriting, having been home to ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” hosts Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, columnist and Caitlan Clark biographer Christine Brennan, New Yorker editor David Remnick and the Atlantic’s Sally Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

Post executive editor Matt Murray acknowledged in an interview with the Times that the paper “does break through” at times with great sports coverage. But the Post isn’t “seen digitally as a major sports destination,” pointing out the popularity of video and how professional leagues tell their own stories. 

Indeed, the first tab on the website for the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks is a “News” tab, complete with stories about the team’s triumph, fresh updates and features on players. The Washington Commanders have a news page with similar stories and features. Teams also post game clips on social media platforms moments after they happen, as well as game results.

Going forward, Murray said the Post will cover sports as a cultural and societal phenomenon. But Post readers also looked to the paper for more local offerings, with more than 30,000 users following its high school sports account on X. 

Powell, an Atlantic staff writer who wrote a book chronicling a Navajo high school basketball team, told TheWrap that high school sports coverage provides a level of access to players that reporters wouldn’t get on a collegiate or professional level. The coverage allows them to follow an athlete through college, and perhaps, their professional career.

Ryan Hunt, a University of Florida lecturer and a former Sports Illustrated editor-in-chief, added: “Most sports reporters kind of got their start covering high schools.”

“That beat isn’t as prevalent anymore in newspapers, especially as there are fewer and fewer newspapers,” he added. “So the way into the industry and way to evolve through the industry definitely has changed.”

“People follow individuals”

Live sports remains the linchpin of linear television, and is increasingly coveted by streamers like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix and Peacock. Sports accounted for 96 of the top 100 telecasts of 2025, with the NFL dominating as this month’s Super Bowl drew 124.9 million viewers across broadcast and digital platforms.

The intense appetite for sports coverage has allowed for new, engaging voices to surge. Torre launched “Pablo Torre Finds Out” with Dan Le Betard’s Meadowlark Media in 2023. The show has broken a number of stories, including one alleging that the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the salary cap to pay Kawhi Leonard, and generated buzz through its dogged reporting on Jordon Huston, the 24-year-old girlfriend of former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.

Kevin Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times who previously worked as a Post managing editor, said Torre’s rise represented how personalities can supersede established brands in sports journalism. For those brands to stay relevant, he said, they have to figure out how to make use of the personalities they have at their disposal, as fans will flock to where they’ll find exclusive information. 

“‘I know Pablo Torre broke all that, so I’m going to stay with Pablo on that one,’” he said, describing a hypothetical fan’s viewing habits. “People follow individuals. That’s the part of the system we’re in.” 

Another sign of the times: The Athletic cut a deal with Torre last August to bring his show to its podcast network.

Audience first

Ginsberg said Athletic reporters are expected to focus on what fans care about most, and determine the best way to deliver the story — whether that remains adding graphics to a text-based piece or going the video route. 

The Athletic has expanded its video and graphics arms, he said, to prioritize such interactive storytelling methods, such as reporter-produced videos posted to its Olympics live blogs and a new weekly video series, “The Athletic Show.”

“At the root of it, it’s what the fans want to know, and what can we tell them that nobody else is telling them?” said Ginsberg, who called the Post’s decision to cut its sports desk “a real body blow to all journalists, and especially so for those of us who were at the Washington Post.”

Some efforts at experimenting with technology haven’t panned out. USA Today Co., formerly Gannett, experimented with AI to write game recaps of high school games in 2023 before ending the practice after national backlash.

Still, Ginsberg’s Athletic needs to innovate because it also faces stiff competition, he said, pointing to the sports sections of the Daily Memphian, the Boston Globe and the Baltimore Banner. The California Post, too, has also made sports reporting a focus, hiring several sports writers from the Los Angeles Times ahead of the big sporting events over the next two years.

“The successful local outlets out there actually lead with sports journalism,” he said. “You see it at the top of their newsletter, at the top of their homepage. It’s of intense interest to people all across the country — I think actually, interest in sports at every level is across the board.”

Ultimately, Ginsberg said, he felt the need “to prove the value of sports journalism” through the Athletic’s work, especially in light of the Post’s sports-desk decision.

“Fans are into sports for lots of reasons, but one of the big ones is fun, and they want to get good information out of it, and so they’ll gravitate to places that are fun and that give them good information,” he said. “At the Athletic, we’re trying to do both.”

Jon Clegg, the Wall Street Journal’s executive news editor and its former sports editor, said the business-forward paper has long covered sports beyond the local lens. Some provocative recent pieces — “The Sudden Breakup That’s Shocked All of Tennis,” “Confessing Exes, Cursing Curlers and a Condom Shortage: When the Olympics Get Weird” — are also likely to reach readers who might never trek to the sports section, along with diehard fans. 

“We just decided not to even attempt to cover that sort of commoditized sports news, and instead try and do more ambitious, more interesting, more original content,” he said. “I think there will always be a market for that.”

But if an outlet’s business model is local, then sports appear integral. 

The Baltimore Banner, which launched in 2022 and last year won its first Pulitzer Prize, announced last week that it would expand its sports section to cover Washington-based teams, noting that “excellent sports journalism drives reader engagement and subscriber retention.”

“At a time when so much pulls communities apart,” its announcement read, “sports bring us together.”

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