Hodge: The Times are changing — literally

On July 10, it was announced that the New York Times would discontinue its prominent sports department and, instead, rely on the sports media website that it acquired last year, the Athletic, for their sports coverage online and in print in the near future. Just a day before that though, the Los Angeles Times announced that their sports section would be doing away with game coverage, box scores, and listings and that they’d be going to a “magazine-style format with in-depth profiles, investigations, analysis, and opinion columns,” according to their website.

To subscribers and readers of the newspapers, this news was stunning — but for those who work in the industry, like me, dejecting is a better way of describing the emotions felt.

The new media that has taken over has already caused harm to traditional media over the years; this is just another example of the issue. The reporters that have worked to build local connections within their communities will soon no longer matter. The stories that speak to the towns and areas that aren’t supported enough by big media companies will diminish. Breaking news stories that communities thrive on and need to know about will become slower in response. This is the future of all media as we know it.

With sports media though, it must be different. If it’s not, then why is it treated as such? Just before I started to write this column, I read a different one named “NYT Sports: An obituary,” which was about Lynn Zinser, a former New York Times sports journalist, and her experience working there.

If there’s one thing I’ll remember while reading that piece, it’s when she stated, “But what most people don’t realize about the Times is, even back in the ‘good old days,’ before the Internet age came for us all, the sports department always felt like it lived on borrowed Times time. We lived with the feeling that the journalism blue bloods at the top barely tolerated us, believed sports frivolous, forgot about us entirely most days because in the old Times building on 43rd Street we were on a separate floor.”

For those of us that have a passion for giving athletes the coverage they deserve, it gets harder and harder to keep holding onto the cliff that is sports media. Eventually, we’re going to fall off. And who knows where we end up from there?

I thought very hard about the aforementioned statement for the past few months. To the point where I wanted to leave this and find a new career. But I have a passion for sports and want to talk to the athletes and hear their thoughts from their perspectives. It shouldn’t have to cost me, though. The challenges that anyone who works in sports — and in media altogether — have to go through are unnecessary and beyond me. Fighting to put food on the table, to pay the bills, to afford an apartment or house — all of it shouldn’t be what we have to go through.

To those sports journalists and writers who work for the New York and LA Times, I’m terribly sorry this is where our industry is ending up. If you end up leaving it, nobody can blame you — a phrase I see and hear entirely too often for those who leave the industry.

This is becoming the present of all media. But how much longer can we all hold on to that cliff?