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 staff of The Athletic will now provide the bulk of the coverage of sporting events, athletes and leagues for Times readers and, for the first time, articles from The Athletic will appear in The Times’s print newspaper. Online access to The Athletic, which is operated separately from the Times newsroom, is included for those who subscribe to The Times’s bundle of products.
Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles in the newsroom and no layoffs were planned, Mr. Kahn and Ms. Drake said. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The moves are expected to be completed by the fall.
When The Times bought The Athletic, executives said the deal would help the company appeal to a broader audience. They added it to a subscription bundle that includes the main Times news site as well as Cooking, the Wirecutter product review service and Games.
As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.