Gerald Eskenazi
The Demise of Sports (at The Times)
By David A. Andelman
“You go to a sports story for the voice of the writer and the expertise the writer brings,” Silurians’ president Joe Berger said in his tribute to three of The New York Times’ most brilliant sportswriters.
Assembled at October’s Silurians’ luncheon at the National Arts Club were Ira Berkow, Gerry Eskenazi and Harvey Araton, moderated by Newsday columnist Neil Best.
All three had been effectively silenced with The Times’ purchase of The Athletic – replaced, as Berger noted, by “wall-to-wall coverage of curling and cricket.”
Whatever happened, the four asked collectively, to flavorful and insightful coverage of the Yankees, Mets, Jets, Giants, Rangers, and superb Olympic roundups every four years?
Springing from the minds of two hedge fund managers, The Athletic, which replaced the entire sports department of America’s flagship daily, is still losing money while costing its readers the wonder, the texture, the images, the institutional memories, and collective experiences.
Ira Berkow has written 26 books and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for The Times; the 8,000 bylines of Gerald Eskenazi are the second most in Times history; and Harvey Araton covered 10 Olympics, many as a Sports of The Times columnist.
Berkow started off, hardly sheepishly, with an admission: “I don’t read the sports section anymore of The Times.” Eskenazi chimed in, “It was as if all these 46 years I had put in and all the people that I worked with—as if we didn’t exist anymore.”
The explanation Eskenazi said he got from one of the paper’s last sports editors was simple: “More than 50 percent of The New York Times readers are not New Yorkers.” Still, the paper had become a repository of great writing and editing, with a share of quirkiness as well.
Nonetheless, there was a nod that the nature of journalism had changed.
As Berkow saw it, the handwriting was on the wall several years ago when The Times stopped running baseball box scores. “A baseball box score is a gem,” Berkow said. “It tells you the whole story about the game itself and it was fun to see.”
When talking about journalism, Eskenazi recalled that his youngest son corrected him that “it’s not just newspapers. Journalism isn’t what we all grew up with.” He said the “new reality” is “that the papers are looking to see how many people read the online stories and that they might get more hits with Manchester United than they do with the New York Yankees…maybe we’re all old fashioned to think that the print should carry the day.”
Araton recalled that he had attended many Times staff meetings where reporters and editors argued about the scope of coverage. He said that he had initially been in favor of covering all the New York beats.
“But that slowly changed,” Araton said, partly because access to athletes had become increasingly restricted by team owners. “A lot of it has become just wasted money and manpower to staff these games night after night when all you’re doing is providing what the wires can provide—and you’re also at a time when money” is tight for many newspapers.
“That’s where The Athletic really began, with all the cutbacks around the country and the reduction in staff…The Athletic was founded to do all the things that newspapers weren’t doing, which is to staff every team.” Subscribers can program the service to “send the stuff that I’m interested in—if it’s Penn State football or the Yankees or Liverpool or Manchester United or whatever.”
Gerald Eskenazi hit on a central problem faced by The Athletic in replacing the sports department: “Do we know who they are? Do they know who their readers are? They don’t represent The New York Times because I don’t think they grew up with its culture. They didn’t grow up with the culture of New York City, and this is a problem.
Who exactly was responsible for replacing the sports department with The Athletic? Berkow thought it had to be the Sulzberger family. Araton’s view was more nuanced. “The Times had a billion-plus in their cash reserve…You don’t sit on a lot of cash; you try to invest it and grow your business.” He pointed to the Times’ successful acquisition and integration of Wirecutter, which reviews and recommends consumer products.
[Editors Note: On November 8, The Times reported that in the last quarter, The Athletic lost $7.9 million—a total of $68 million since the purchase. The Times said it still projects The Athletic will turn a profit after three years. It said total subscribers had surpassed 10 million – 670,000 print and 9.41 million digital. This reflected a net increase of 210,000 digital, but a loss of 70,000 print subscribers.]
Leave it to our esteemed president, himself a Times veteran, to sum it all up, turning to our three venerable guests of honor. “What’s been lost in this conversion to The Athletic is the wonderful voices of people like yourselves, and the expertise of people like yourselves, and that’s a huge loss.
