The NY Times is closing its sports department. Some 35 writers and editors will be impacted—but the paper plans to place them in other jobs.

This is part of a wider crisis in sports journalism. Just yesterday, the LA Times announced that it is eliminating box scores, standings, and game stories from its coverage. That’s like covering sports without actually covering sports—everything becomes just another piece of lifestyle reporting.

The Times will rely on the sports blog it recently acquired (The Athletic) for coverage—but The Athletic is losing money, and has also been reducing headcount. So the latest move is not really a solution, just another stopgap.

Don’t think for one moment that such drastic steps won’t happen in other parts of the newspaper. For example, you might think it’s impossible for the publishers to squeeze arts and entertainment coverage much more than it’s already been squeezed. But that’s not true—there is still more ink to be saved and more jobs to be lost.

In the meantime, I will be interested to see how quickly smart sports coverage migrates to Substack. I’ve already seen some signs of that, but it’s still early days.