Yesterday, the Washington Post announced that it was laying off a third of its staff. With it, its sports section, which had a number of great and visionary reporters. And it remained one of only a handful of newspapers from major cities that covered scholastic sports.
The depth of its commitment was such that it commissioned a web presence for swimming called “Reach For The Wall.” (Tellingly, its last update was last October.)
Having worked at a newspaper (one which has since vanished), it is hard for me to express exactly what it meant to grind out copy as part of an integrated team (sales, art, editing, copy, press) every day with the regularity and quality that its readers expect.
So, I’ll let Buddy Martin, a long-retired sports editor now running a University of Florida sports presence, tell you:
They didn’t just kill off sports pages. They walked into the newsroom, yanked the soul out of the building and told us not to worry because “the content will be even better now.” That’s not evolution. That’s a mugging dressed up as a memo.
I spent a lifetime in these trenches — five sports editorships, five mastheads, five sets of presses humming through the night — and I’ll tell you this: A real sports section is a living, breathing organism. It’s the guys and women at 11:45 p.m. arguing over a headline, the copy desk catching a stat on deadline, the beat writer changing leads because a kid hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. You don’t “transition” that into a vertical. You don’t “repurpose” it into a brand.
You either have a sports section or you don’t. Right now, more and more of them just don’t.
The New York Times didn’t just “disband” its sports department. It took a proud, talented group of reporters and editors and told them their life’s work could be subcontracted out to a property it bought for $550 million. They folded the tent and then pointed to The Athletic and said, “Look, more stories than ever.”
That’s like bulldozing Yankee Stadium, putting up a luxury condo with a batting cage in the lobby and bragging that fans now have “enhanced baseball experiences.” You didn’t enhance a damn thing. You erased something irreplaceable and handed the keys to a spreadsheet.
I went up against the Times every day for four years at the Daily News. They were a worthy opponent then, especially when people like my friend Neil Amdur was steering the ship, pushing for excellence and giving a damn about what went in the paper.
Now you get buzzwords. “Optimization.” “Alignment.” “Bundles.” Somewhere in there, the games and the people who covered them became line items instead of lifeblood.
And then there’s the Washington Post, once the cathedral of sports sections. George Solomon and his crew helped redefine what a sports page could be. They hired craftsmen and original voices — Dave Kindred, Sally Jenkins, Tony Kornheiser and others — people who could make a Tuesday in February feel like the seventh game of the World Series. That section didn’t happen by accident. It was built brick by brick, word by word, over decades.
Now? The same paper is hacking away at its sports desk as if it were a bad stock pick, “revising” Olympic plans by email two weeks before the Games, leaving reporters dangling and can’t even say with a straight face what its Super Bowl coverage is going to look like.
I texted my old Florida classmate George Solomon, long since retired: “How sad and pathetic. All those years of blood and sweat and tears and love you invested and Jeff Bezos let it rot on the vine. Damn him!”
That wasn’t hyperbole. That was grief.
Here’s what the geniuses in the corner offices will never understand: You can’t lay off institutional memory and expect to keep credibility. You can’t gut the staff that knows the high school coach from 1978, the beat writer who remembers why a town still hates a call from 1985 and then pretend that a generic “explainer” from halfway across the country serving the same audience.
You can’t replace the woman who’s covered the local NFL team for 20 years with a rotating cast of “contributors” and call that an upgrade. But they will try, because it looks cleaner on a PowerPoint slide.
Sports sections were never just about scores and standings. They were the back fence of the city. You learned who you were as a fan, as a town, by the way your paper told the story of your teams. A columnist ripped the owner when he deserved it. A beat writer humanized the backup catcher. A prep stringer gave a whole county its moment on Saturday morning.
It was a covenant: We show up, every day, on deadline, to tell you what happened and why it mattered.
Now, instead of that covenant, we’re handed the gospel of “engagement metrics.”
Editors talk about “vertical integration” and “synergies” while killing the one thing that ever made these institutions special: The trust forged between reader and byline. The people making these decisions don’t know what it feels like to stand in a nearly empty newsroom at 1 a.m., listening to the presses thunder to life, knowing your section — your section — is riding on those conveyor belts into every corner of the city.
They know quarterly earnings, not quarterfinals.
Make no mistake: This is not just about nostalgia for ink-stained wretches. This is about the slow, deliberate suffocation of serious, local sports journalism in favor of cheap content factories and brand “extensions.”
You can see it in the way the Times turned over the keys to a national platform while quietly reducing the kind of deeply reported, idiosyncratic coverage only a dedicated in-house desk can deliver. You can see it in how the Post lurches from one chaotic edict to another, first canceling, then revising Olympics coverage, all while rumors swirl that the sports desk itself might be headed for the guillotine.
Here’s what nobody at the top wants to say out loud: They’re not just cutting costs. They’re surrendering. They’ve convinced themselves that fans will be satisfied with highlight clips and personality podcasts, that nobody needs grown-up, independent sports journalism anchored in a real newsroom anymore.
They think the history, the craft, the accountability don’t matter as long as the SEO is good and the video auto-plays. That’s not vision. That’s cowardice.
I came up in an era when you were measured by the quality of your section and the loyalty of your readers. We bled for those extra inches on the front page, for the right photo, for the phone call from a coach who hated what you wrote because at least it meant he read it.
We believed in the idea that if you told the story honestly and well, you’d earned your spot on that doorstep every morning. Try putting that on a slide for your next “town hall.”
So yes, it’s a changing world, and yes, some change is inevitable. But don’t insult us by pretending this is some bold new frontier. Killing off sports pages in the name of “efficiency” is not progress. It’s vandalism. It is the deliberate destruction of something generations of journalists built with their time, their talent, and their hearts.
And I’ll say this as plainly as I can, from one old newspaperman’s heart: When you turn off the lights in a sports department, you’re not just saving money. You’re telling your readers — and your own people — that the games they love, the stories we’ve told, the history we’ve chronicled, no longer matter enough to stand on their own.
Damn them for that!