Late in January, while the Washington Post was gearing up for the Olympics, staffers got an email from managing editor Kimi Yoshino. “As we assess our priorities for 2026,” she wrote, “we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” A few days later the Post announced that it would send four journalists to Italy after all – down from more than a dozen. That’s four people to cover a two-week event with more than 116 medal competitions. Then at the start of this month, all 45 members of the sports team were told the section was being shut down. “We will be closing the Sports department in its current form,” the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in a statement afterwards. A few staff members will be reassigned to other desks in the newsroom, but most have been fired. How things have changed since the days when Shirley Povich, the paper’s legendary sports columnist, gave young reporters a pointer: “You’ve got to go to an event if you’re going to cover it.”
Publisher Katharine Graham used to say that Povich’s popularity saved the Post when it was number four in a five-paper city. Warren Buffett, whose first job was as a teenage delivery boy for the paper, recruited subscribers by talking up Povich’s column. Since then the Post’s sports section has featured some of the field’s best talent, with reporting and opinion from Tom Boswell, John Feinstein, Sally Jenkins, George F. Will, Jane Leavy, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon and others. USA Today’s Christine Brennan, a former Postie who covered the Olympics (in person) from 1988 to 1996, called the paper’s moves a “stunning and awful development.”
Stunning, but not so surprising. The cutbacks are part of a larger retrenchment in which Post owner Jeff Bezos prioritizes politics and video while paying $75 million to produce and promote the documercial Melania. That is about 1,000 times what the paper saved by sending a skeleton crew to cover skeleton, luge and 114 other Winter Olympic events. But the Post isn’t the first prominent paper to cut the legs off its sports desk. Three years ago the New York Times disbanded its celebrated sports department and farmed out sports coverage after buying the all-digital Athletic for $550 million. That was the move that will be seen as the obit for the old-fashioned sports page, the one that told aging sportswriters like me that we are dinosaurs.
Some 23 million readers waited for Sports Illustrated writers to tell them what the week’s games meant
When I worked at Sports Illustrated a quarter-century ago, print was still king. It was the magazine’s late heyday, a time when it helped define the country’s view of athletes and athletics. Some 23 million readers waited for SI writers to tell them what the week’s games meant. And that weekly sausage was made with levels of attention unmatched even at the Times and Post. Each story ran a gantlet – repeat trips through editing and fact-checking, with editors’ questions, fact- and copy-checkers’ tweaks and writers’ replies bouncing back and forth until the facts were confirmed, sources double-checked, mixed metaphors nixed, punctuation fought over.
One night, hours before that week’s magazine closed, an SI fact-checker saved a sentence by reaching the Vatican and finding out how much Pope John Paul II weighed. Errors got through, but not for want of trying to catch them while respecting the writer’s voice. A senior editor like me got to work with Tom Verducci on baseball, Peter King on football, George Plimpton on boxing and Rick Reilly on jokes. I needed permission from the managing editor to change a comma in Reilly’s back-page “Life of Reilly” column – a policy that made sense because Reilly, then the country’s top sports columnist, relied on comic timing and down-to-the-syllable punchlines. USA Today called Reilly “the closest thing sportswriting ever had to a rock star.”
Today’s sportswriters are becoming more like roadies, doing drudgework that helps corporate bosses sell their brands. Most of SI’s writers and editors have been laid off – replaced in one infamous instance by AI-generated “reporting” that read almost as if a human had written it, with bylines from “Drew Ortiz” and “Sora Tanaka,” sportswriters who don’t exist. As print journalism fades, voices like Povich’s and Kornheiser’s are drowned out by knucklehead “sports influencers.” Podcasters such as Dave Portnoy and Pat McAfee don’t write. They shout. Unedited, they walk back their biggest mistakes, as McAfee did last year after telling his million-plus listeners – falsely – that a University of Mississippi student had slept with her boyfriend’s father. Meanwhile, Stephen A. Smith, whose journalistic chops helped make him ESPN’s leading voice, has become a cartoon of himself, an entertainer who would rather make you cheer or boo what he says than tell you what happened in last night’s game, which you already know because you saw the highlights and are still arguing about them online.
Which leaves dinosaurs like me squinting through our bifocals at the Athletic, with its quick takes, typos and grammatical flubs that come from a hurried, practically unedited rush to the laptop click that publishes a story. But the Athletic is also the best sports page we have left, with Tyler Kepner, Jim Bowden, Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark on baseball; Mike Sando on the NFL; Gabby Herzig on golf; Andrew Marchand on sports media; and a growing cast of experts that could make today’s readers forget the glory days of SI and newspaper sports desks.
But they haven’t done it yet. For now, Post readers will have to rely on half-assed coverage of the Olympics and little to no coverage of the Nationals’ spring training in Florida. “It’s bad news,” says Maury Povich, the TV personality whose father Shirley made the Post’s sports section one of the best in the world. “It’s devastating. As soon as I heard the rumors, my father came to mind. The way I’d put it is to paraphrase the end of my father’s most famous lede, from his column about Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series: ‘The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. And the Washington Post scrapped its sports section.’”
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