Merging Departments Without Laying People Off (Insider Comms From The New York Times)
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On July 10 the chairman and the CEO of The New York Times announced they were doing away with their sports reporting desk by folding the staff and operations into The Athletic, the sports reporting media group they acquired in 2022.
Essentially The Times is folding one department into another.
Importantly, there are no layoffs with this move.
The memo is co-signed by A.G. Sulzberger, chairman and publisher, and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. That’s kinda like having the board chair and your CEO co-sign a letter to your employees explaining a business decision.
What the memo gets right:
They don’t bury the lede. The news—which isn’t very good news for the Times’ sports reporters—is delivered in the first sentence.
Compare to Snap’s memo ($), which takes five paragraphs of tiptoeing to get to the news about layoffs.
Paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 deliver exactly what employees immediately want to know: what’s the word and are there layoffs? The rest of the memo gives the business decision for the move.
I like the send-off. Rather than end with some hokey rah-rah “the best is yet to come” pablum, Sulzberger and Kopit Levien end the memo with a statement of purpose: we believe this is the right business decision. Period.
What could be improved?
Paragraphs 4, 5, and 6 explain why they are merging departments, though it seems a little oversold by the end. This could be condensed into two paragraphs.
And the use of “utilize” in the fourth graf? [gets out red pencil] A good journalist knows that one syllable (use) is better than three.
I’m nitpicking, though. The memo is deprived of the fluff many execs use to muffle the sound of bad news (see above: Snap). The Times’ execs obviously know and respect their audience.
Adjacent: compare this NYT memo explaining business moves to that of Insider media, which looks for reasons why the business is not doing well ($).
Here’s the memo:
Colleagues,
Joe and Monica just shared with our colleagues in the newsroom plans to shift our approach to sports coverage, focusing more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism, and making greater use of The Athletic’s journalism for daily sports coverage for our readers.
As part of these changes, we will no longer have a freestanding Sports desk, and current Sports staff will transition to other desks around the newsroom. Many of these colleagues will continue on their new desks to produce the signature general interest journalism about sports — exploring the business, culture and power structures of sports, particularly through enterprising reporting and investigations — for which they are so well known.
There are no plans for layoffs and newsroom leadership will actively work with all our Sports colleagues to ensure they land in the right roles.
We intend to utilize The Athletic — which has among the largest sports newsrooms in the world — to provide Times readers with a greater abundance of sports coverage than ever before. Under our plan, the digital homepage, newsletters, social feeds, the sports landing page and the print section will draw from even more of the approximately 150 stories The Athletic produces each day chronicling leagues, teams and players across the United States and around the globe.
Since the acquisition of The Athletic 18 months ago, our goal has been to become a global leader in sports journalism, which represents a major pillar of our company strategy to be the essential subscription for curious people around the world. The Athletic has expanded on its award-winning, deeply reported coverage of teams, leagues and players to more aggressively cover the biggest, most compelling sports stories of the day for devoted fans everywhere. This journalistic excellence has translated into meaningful growth for The Athletic in terms of audience, revenue and number of subscribers with paid access.
AG and newsroom leadership made this decision after careful deliberation and with deep admiration for our colleagues in Sports. They have long produced some of The Times’s most distinctive journalism — from investigations into urgent topics like concussions and doping, to must-read features on a women’s soccer team in Afghanistan, a tragic avalanche in Washington and much more — and we have no doubt they will continue this tradition from their new desks in the future. Though we know this decision will be disappointing to some, we believe it is the right one for readers and will allow us to maximize the respective strengths of The Times’s and The Athletic’s newsrooms.
Our essential subscription strategy is working, even at a moment of considerable pressure on our industry. By finding new ways to serve readers and their passions, we’ve been able to continue to grow as a company and to add nearly 1,000 journalism jobs in recent years, half of which have been in the Times newsroom and half in The Athletic and Wirecutter newsrooms.
We believe that these plans will put us in an even stronger position to deliver on our mission and serve our readers.
— AG and Meredith
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