Should the New York Times ditch its sports section?
November 12th, 2009 by David Rothman
How many people read the New York Times for its sports coverage? Time to drop the section? The newspaper itself has brought up but shrugged off the possibility, saying it wouldn’t save enough and would lessen the NYT’s quality.
Over at the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Coven wonders if the Times couldn’t “rent out somebody else’s sports section and stick it in the paper with a NYT label on it and maybe an extra article about the Knicks?" (Via Jim Romenesko.)
I don’t read the sports coverage in any paper, so if the NYT drops its sports section, I certainly won’t miss it.
ditto. sports is a waste of paper. who CARES? let sports go digital . sure . good riddance
I’m a very long time home delivery subscriber to the NYT, longer than 10 years, and in all that time, I have never read anything in the sports section (I don’t even read it in my local Gannett rag). So as far as I’m concerned, the sports section could disappear and all I’d notice is that the paper was thinner.
However, there are other sections that the NYT could also discard as far as I’m concerned, such as Home, Design, Fashion and Real Estate. There are several others that could be added from the Sunday edition as well.
Well, I think the basic issue here is that very few people read articles from every section of a news paper. While the New York Times is not necessarily the choice of sports fans, there are other papers who would experience a crippling loss of circulation if they cut out their sports sections.
Perhaps, News Papers might do better if they allow people to subscribe to the sections they want to read. Readers would then feel like they were getting a better value for their money since they are only getting stuff that interests them.