Sports news outlet The Athletic, which The New York Times acquired last year, is laying off 4% of its newsroom staff, or roughly 20 people, according to a memo editors sent to staff Monday.
The layoffs, first reported by The Washington Post, are part of an effort to redirect resources to coverage areas that are more popular with readers. The Athletic will also move more than 20 reporters to new beats and expects the overall size of its newsroom to grow this year, according to the memo.
Front Office Sports has a list of Athletic staff members who announced their departures. The list includes columnists, reporters and editors across the country, from Brooklyn to San Jose.
The Athletic’s strategy has evolved over the past few years, publisher David Perpich and editor Steven Ginsberg wrote to staff Monday.
“It began with a one-size-fits-all approach of assigning one beat reporter to each team, providing year-round coverage regardless of reader interest,” they wrote. “But we’ve been moving toward a strategy much more focused on telling the most compelling stories for fans across the teams in a given league, drawing on both local and national reporting expertise.”
As part of the cuts, The Athletic will eliminate some local MLB and NHL beats “due to smaller interest from fans,” according to the memo. Front Office Sports’ A.J. Perez wrote that they were “the kind of underserved beats” that were a focus when The Athletic was founded.
Started in 2016, The Athletic began as a subscription-based digital startup that aimed to replace the sports coverage traditionally done by local newspapers. The site poached top local sports journalists in North America and eventually expanded coverage to Europe. Its founders raised $139.5 million over five rounds before selling the company to The New York Times in January 2022 for $550 million. At the time, The Athletic had roughly 400 editorial staff members and 1.2 million subscriptions.
The Athletic now has roughly 3.3 million subscriptions, according to the Times’ most recent earnings report. However, it has continued to suffer losses, including an operating loss of $7.8 million last quarter.
New York Times spokesperson Jordan Cohen wrote in an emailed statement that despite the layoffs, the company plans to continue investing in The Athletic’s editorial operations. The Athletic will tailor its coverage approaches to each sports league and maintain more than 100 beat reporters covering individual teams, according to the memo.
Nearly two years ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill denied tenure for Pulitzer-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones when the university’s trustees failed to approve the journalism department’s recommendation. Hannah-Jones had been courted for the position of Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where she earned a master’s degree in 2003.
The trustees’ decision sparked great controversy, with intense outcry from faculty, alumni and students — as well as other journalists.
The board later granted tenure to the acclaimed journalist but, less than a week later, the mastermind behind The New York Times’ “1619 Project” declined the offer. In her first televised interview after her decision, with CBS’s Gayle King, Hannah-Jones called it a “very difficult decision” and announced she was headed to Howard University as its inaugural Knight Chair of Race and Journalism.
With Hannah-Jones moving on, the months that followed proved a great challenge for the journalism school. Their untangling appears to be a slow-going process. NC Newsline on Monday published an in-depth story about mounted frustrations over UNC’s slow transfer of funds belonging to the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting — a journalism organization co-founded by Hannah-Jones. In February, Morehouse College announced that the organization would move from UNC-Chapel Hill to Morehouse.
“This partnership helps our young organization settle more deeply into our mission, which is to increase the number of investigative reporters of color,” Hannah-Jones said in an official statement. “Being located on the campus of a historically Black college located in Atlanta in proximity to other HBCUs and coming to Morehouse just as it gets its journalism major off the ground provides a tremendous opportunity for us to increase our impact on the field and society.”
But NC Newsline reported UNC has yet to transfer all of the society’s funds — nearly $4 million — to Morehouse. “This is all of our funding,” Hannah-Jones told the outlet in an exclusive interview. “It’s all of our operating funding, all of our grant money, our quasi-endowment. Without it, we can’t work toward our mission, we can’t do any of our work.”
As a result, the organization was forced to cancel its summer internship program and a new program for high school students, according to the report.
Named after prominent Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, the society was founded by Hannah-Jones and fellow journalists Ron Nixon, Corey Johnson and Topher Sanders and is “dedicated to increasing and retaining reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting.”
NC Newsline’s reported that UNC-Chapel Hill’s communications office “disputed the society’s characterization of the transfer process in a statement last week, saying it has worked as quickly as possible to transfer the money.” In a statement, the school said it had completed a transfer of nearly $2.1 million in funds to date.
Since joining The New York Times Magazine in 2015, Hannah-Jones’ investigative work has largely focused on civil rights and racial injustice. In 2020 she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay in “The 1619 Project.”
Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., on July 22, 2018. Newspaper owner Jeff Bezos announced Ryan’s departure in a memo to staff on Monday. He’ll continue as publisher and CEO for two more months.(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)
The publisher and chief executive of one of the most influential news organizations in the U.S. is stepping down. Fred Ryan announced he will leave his leadership roles at The Washington Post in August to head a civility initiative at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.
Ryan, who has been Post publisher for nine years, presided over an era of significant growth and change under the ownership of billionaire Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013. In that time, the Post nearly doubled its staff, shifted to earning more revenue from digital than print, and grew in influence and reach, especially under the editorship of Marty Baron and during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Ryan told the Post that “the decline in civility is threatening the foundation of our democracy,” explaining his move to head the new nonpartisan Center on Public Civility, which he said Bezos fully supports.
Bezos announced that Patty Stonesifer, who led the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from its inception in 1997 to 2009, will be the interim CEO at the Post and lead the search for Ryan’s successor. Stonesifer sits on the board of Amazon.
Like most high-profile news organizations, the Post has recently had its share of challenges, financial and otherwise. It laid off 20 staffers earlier this year in a process that earned Ryan criticism when he told a staff meeting in late 2022 that layoffs were coming but left without answering questions.
Ryan told the Post his departure did not have anything to do with a declining readership that saw the Post drop from 3 million digital subscribers in early 2021 to 2 million today. The paper finished last year in the red after several years of profit, according to its story.
The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson reported that “Some employees expressed relief upon hearing the news of Mr. Ryan’s impending departure Monday.” They told the Times reporters they were frustrated with the business culture under Ryan.
Among Ryan’s most notable actions at the Post were working to secure the release of Jason Rezaian, a Post reporter arrested in Iran, and replacing Baron when he retired in 2021, choosing Sally Buzbee, formerly of The Associated Press, as the Post’s first female editor.
Reddit users logging on Monday found some of the site’s top subreddits were limiting posts or may have switched to private, hiding their content from the “Front Page of the Internet.” The blackout eventually crashed the site.
The user-generated revolt — on a site that relies heavily on user-generated content — is a response to the company raising its API rate (similar to changes made at Twitter by Elon Musk) and effectively killing third-party apps many use to access the site. The third-party apps allow users to bypass much of the advertising on the official Reddit app and often provide a more custom user experience.
Christian Selig, creator of the popular Apollo app, has been one of the more vocal opponents of the rate increase.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman responded via a site AMA, saying, “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.” The Verge has a good breakdown of the events as well as a link to a Twitch stream tracking participating subreddits.
Reddit was formerly owned by Condé Nast but is now a private company majority-owned by Advance Publications.
The Missoulian in Montana is the latest daily newspaper owned by Lee Enterprises to announce a shift to a three-day print schedule.
Though the paper will continue to provide daily coverage, it will only print paper editions three days a week starting July 11. In doing so, the Missoulian joins at least 30 other Lee papers in reducing its print frequency. Lee Enterprises owns 77 dailies across the country — including the St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Buffalo News and the Omaha World-Herald — that have traditionally printed seven days a week.
All but 20 of Lee’s largest papers will see reductions in print days, the Daily Montanan reported in April. The changes come as the company implements a number of other cost-saving measures, including layoffs and unpaid furloughs. During an earnings call last month, president and CEO Kevin Mowbray told shareholders that the company had to “reset” its “print cost structure” due to print advertising declines.
Lara Logan in 2017. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
People have been asking what happened to Lara Logan, the once-respected “60 Minutes” correspondent now viewed as too “out there” even for Newsmax, for a while. The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro chronicles Logan’s rise and fall from prominence as a foreign correspondent in a new profile, “A Star Reporter’s Break with Reality.”
She concludes Logan is a true believer in the right-wing conspiracy theories she now espouses while speaking at events like Moms for Liberty conferences in church auditoriums, having lost her last TV gigs after saying on Newsmax in October that the global elite “want us eating insects” while they “dine on the blood of children.”
Now she fills her schedule with personal appearances in which she promotes the work of Michael Flynn, says that supporting Ukraine against Russia is akin to arming Nazis, and that social media is a form of “controlling us all” that harkens back to the work of Karl Marx.
- Guardian News & Media has apologized for how it handled complaints of sexual harassment by several women against one of its star columnists, Nick Cohen, according to The New York Times. The publisher of the Guardian and Observer newspapers also apologized to the women. The Times reported that the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, and chief executive, Anna Bateson, wrote one woman an email that read, in part: “We want to apologize for your experience of sexual harassment by an Observer member of staff, and for the way your complaint was handled.” The organization will change its policy so that newsroom managers will no longer investigate harassment complaints. The apologies and changes follow a New York Times investigation published last month in which several women said Cohen grabbed them or sent unwanted messages over the course of nearly 20 years.
- Yikes. Time Magazine published a story with the headline “How Ukraine’s Dam Collapse Could Become the Country’s ‘Chernobyl’.” The Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986 near the city of Pripyat in the former USSR — on Ukrainian territory. By late morning, Time changed the headline to “How Ukraine’s Dam Collapse Could Have ‘Generational’ Consequences.”
Today’s edition of the Poynter Report was written by Amaris Castillo, Tony Elkins, Angela Fu, Jennifer Orsi and Ren LaForme.
Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.
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