The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.
The acquisition of The Athletic had raised questions about the future of The Times’s sports department, which has included numerous distinguished journalists. The Sports of The Times column was started by John Kieran in 1927, and would later include a distinguished group of writers, including Robert Lipsyte, William Rhoden, Harvey Araton, Selena Roberts, George Vecsey and Ira Berkow.
Three Sports of The Times columnists, Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson, have won Pulitzer Prizes for their sports writing. Another sports reporter, John Branch, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his feature on a deadly avalanche in Washington State, and Josh Haner won the feature photography prize in 2014 for documenting the recovery of a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.
In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared.
In an email to the company on Monday, Mr. Sulzberger and Meredith Kopit Levien, The Times’s chief executive, wrote, “Though we know this decision will be disappointing to some, we believe it is the right one for readers.”
