The Athletic cuts almost 20 jobs, 4% of newsroom for New York Times-owned sports website

The Athletic, a subscription sports outlet owned by The New York Times, is shedding about 4% of its newsroom workers as a part of reorganization efforts, the corporate confirmed on Monday.

The job cuts will affect almost 20 journalists of The Athletic’s 450-person newsroom. In addition to the layoffs, greater than 20 extra reporters from the San Francisco-based outlet shall be moved to new assignments, The New York Times reported.

The New York Times Co. purchased The Athletic for $550 million in January 2022, marking one of many information firm’s largest-ever acquisitions. In a Monday assertion to The Associated Press, New York Times Co. govt director of communications Jordan Cohen famous that the corporate had reorganized the sports website “to cover the most compelling stories that matter to fans across all the teams in a given league daily.”

“As part of the reorganization, we made the difficult decision to eliminate a limited number (4%) of newsroom roles,” Cohen mentioned. “We will continue to invest in our editorial operation as we prioritize initiatives that help us achieve our strategy and expect The Athletic’s newsroom to be larger at the end of this year than it was last year.”

The layoffs have been introduced in a memo to workers from David Perpich, the writer of The Athletic, and govt editor Steven Ginsberg, a number of shops reported Monday.

In the observe, Perpich and Ginsberg wrote about objectives to broaden protection to satisfy viewers curiosity – with a shift away from having one beat reporter for every sports workforce, the Times reported.

“Even with the changes being announced today, the size of our newsroom will grow this year compared to last, as will our overall investments in our editorial group in the years ahead,” Monday’s memo learn, per The Times. “At the end of this process, we will have more than 100 beat reporters on teams.”

For the beginning of 2023, New York Times Co. reported first-quarter earnings of $22.3 million, or 13 cents per share. Earnings, adjusted for one-time positive factors and prices, got here to 19 cents per share.