I don’t want to hear a word about the glory days of the Washington Post sports section. Not one story about Tony and Mike and Boz. Nothing about how John Feinstein drove George Solomon up the wall or how David Remnick visited the Boston Garden on his way to the Condé Nast Building.
Here on the day the Washington Post sports section died—was killed, in fact—we ought to resist nostalgia for two reasons. First, nostalgia does little to polish the circulating résumés of the Post sportswriters who lost their jobs.
Second, nostalgia is liable to make you wistful. What happened today should make you angry.
The Post sports section was killed Wednesday in the same mass event that claimed much of the paper’s foreign and metro coverage, as well as its books section.
The killing of the sports section was given the leadoff spot on a staff Zoom call that was led by Post executive editor Matt Murray. The paper is keeping a sportswriting skeleton crew in place, said Murray, to write features about sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon."
“I have told people I expect 95 to 99 percent of the department is going to be laid off,” one Post sportswriter told me over the weekend. “My personal best-case scenario is to be one of the handful of survivors.” That sportswriter is now looking for a job.
(The writer was one of a half dozen writers in the section who were granted anonymity to talk honestly about the Post; they would love to hear from you now.)
Nostalgia is liable to make you wistful. What happened today should make you angry.
To write an obit for a sports section free of the tales of fat expense accounts and endless road trips, we should stick to the basics. What the section’s final years were like. What might have been done to save it. And what the Post will be like without it.
“It’s like somebody taking a hammer to my heart,” said Sally Jenkins, who wrote a Post sports column until she left the paper last summer. “It’s not just broken. It’s broken into about 20 pieces, one for every single one of my close friends there.” I know the feeling.
One year ago, on the Friday before the Super Bowl, Post sportswriters who were covering the big game were invited to have drinks with Will Lewis, the CEO and publisher. The meeting, at a French Quarter restaurant known for its daiquiris, was optional, Lewis said. But c’mon. Post sportswriters, who felt like they worked on an outer planet of their paper’s solar system, weren’t going to miss it.
The writers hoped for more than just face time with the boss. Three months earlier, Post owner Jeff Bezos had pulled the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, chasing off 250,000 subscribers and starting an exodus of more than 100 Post journalists. Maybe Lewis, a native Londoner who had been the editor of The Daily Telegraph and CEO of Dow Jones, was reintroducing himself to the newsroom. Maybe he could offer a pick-me-up. “You thought there would be some articulation of a plan,” said one writer who attended.
Lewis arrived at the restaurant with some British buddies that Post sportswriters referred to thereafter as “the blokes.” Immediately, Lewis made it clear he didn’t want to talk about the paper. He wanted to talk ball.
It’s a Greenland-sized irony that the publisher who presided over the closing of the Post’s sports section is a huge sports fan. Lewis goes to the Super Bowl every year. He sent his sportswriters mash notes, especially early in his tenure.
In New Orleans, Post writers who worried the paper was on the ropes found themselves in a conversation about Eagles-Chiefs. At one point, Lewis told a Post writer to ask one of the blokes about test cricket. “What my colleagues and I concluded is he was using his friends as human shields,” said the writer.
As the gathering began to break up, another Post sportswriter asked if Lewis could give his writers a pep talk. If Lewis could play Nick Sirianni, even if the Post’s recent winning percentage was more like the Browns’. Lewis declined to give a pep talk. Then he and the blokes left.
For Post sportswriters, the last two years were a lot like those drinks in New Orleans. If Lewis’s editors had radical ideas about the Post’s sports section—how to break it, how to modernize it, how to write a Wizards gamer somebody would actually read—those ideas never reached the ears of the writers I spoke to. (At press time, the Post’s communications staff hadn’t responded to emailed questions about how top editors had tried to modernize or reinvent the section.)
Lewis had potential value to the Post. He saw the paper not as an untouchable treasure of American journalism but as a paper that needed a jump-start after the heady days of Trump 1. The Post lost $77 million in 2023, Lewis said at a Post town hall the following year. “Your audience is halved,” Lewis told staffers. “People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
The Post’s sports department was just the kind of section that management might have alighted upon. Post sportswriters winced when they heard people say the section’s glory days ended when Wilbon and Kornheiser left the building. They also looked at their section far more critically than the reporters sticking up for them on social media. “Sports is a very large department,” said one Post sportswriter. “There’s nobody at any point that would argue that it couldn’t get smaller, get swifter, or more svelte.”
“You had people thirsting for radical change in sports,” said one Post writer.
Posties will tell you the sports department was wrestling with the same dilemma as the Post itself. It was trapped between the allure of being a paper of record and the necessity of being a paper that picks its spots. All at once, the Post sports section was trying to churn out the following: a scoop about Colts owner Jim Irsay’s death, big-ticket enterprise stories, a gamer from the Super Bowl, a Ben Strauss media story, a Jesse Dougherty story on the business of college sports, a Roman Stubbs outdoors feature, a write-through of NFL coaching news broken elsewhere, plus coverage of the Commanders and Nationals and Capitals and Wizards.
The quest for bigness carried over to the coverage of big events. Last year, seven sportswriters were invited to have drinks with Lewis during Super Bowl week. Before management intervened ahead of the layoffs, the Post got 14 credentials to cover the Winter Olympics. “It was always ‘We’re trying to be all things to all people,’” said one Post sportswriter, “and, in 2025 and 2026, that’s not sustainable.”
Posties will tell you the sports department was wrestling with the same dilemma as the Post itself. It was trapped between the allure of being a paper of record and the necessity of being a paper that picks its spots.
Last year, with the Commanders stuck at 5-12, the section found it difficult to get readers to click on stories about local teams. (In 2024—the Year of Jayden Daniels—Commanders stories had far more traffic.) One Postie who looked at traffic data pointed to a story from last summer about Trump demanding that the Commanders go back to their old, racist nickname. It was one of the most popular Commanders stories in recent months, yet it got the traffic of an average Post political story.
“People come to ESPN for sports,” said a Post sportswriter, “and people come to The Washington Post for politics. Even if we have a really, really good story, we have to really hustle to try to get the attention of editors and designers and photographers well in advance to try to give that piece a shot.”
If Post sportswriters often felt like outsiders at their own paper, they had ways of getting attention. You forgot you had a sports section, huh? According to writers, enterprise stories and investigations were popular. Sports columns—by Jenkins and Candace Buckner—did well. So did Dougherty’s college sports stories and Strauss’s media stories. Stubbs’s features were big hits. “That guy just did bangers,” said one admiring colleague. Nearly all of these stories attacked sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.”
Two years ago, Kent Babb’s profile of LSU coach Kim Mulkey—a story Mulkey helpfully publicized before it even ran—was a traffic monster. Last month, the Irsay scoop from Will Hobson, Albert Samaha, and Sam Fortier led the Post’s homepage.
Post sportswriters spent two years waiting for the paper’s top editors to weigh in on the big, structural issues the section was grappling with. Do we cover … everything? Do we write that gamer from the Super Bowl? Could we morph into our own version of The Wall Street Journal’s sports section?
They never heard management weigh in. A Post sportswriter said: “It’s like a football team where they say, after they’ve lost 10 games, ‘We got to find our identity.’ For two years, we just didn’t have an identity—and had no idea if we were ever going to find one.”
If the problem was that nobody was reading the Post’s stories about the Commanders, one idea would have been to feed the masses Commanders news in podcast form. The Post sports section didn’t have a podcast.
We all ran a million proposals up the flagpole, all kinds of experiments. Never got any green lights. Never got any support. Never really got any feedback.Sally Jenkins
Ava Wallace hosted a daily podcast during the 2024 Paris Olympics that ended after the Games. Long-form podcasts were pitched but never made. Proposals for a Sally Jenkins podcast went through three different iterations.
“We all ran a million proposals up the flagpole, all kinds of experiments,” said Jenkins. “Never got any green lights. Never got any support. Never really got any feedback.”
A case in point: Last year, a pitch for a Wizards podcast hosted by beat writer Varun Shankar was deemed a nonstarter. So with the paper’s blessing, Shankar produced the podcast himself and distributed it through Blue Wire.
In January, Shankar, who was raised in the D.C. suburbs, left the paper to cover the Rockets for the Houston Chronicle. In what should have been a sign of things to come, the Post didn’t match the Chronicle’s offer.
Trying to figure out how the Post’s sports section could have been saved is a mind-bending exercise. Did anyone who runs the paper want to save it?
Post sportswriters didn’t know their section was on the chopping block until recently. They knew the paper was in trouble, especially after Bezos pulled the opinion section’s Harris endorsement days before the 2024 election. “I can picture where I was sitting when it happened,” said one sports staffer. “I let out an audible, ‘Oh, fuck!’ And I felt, in the moment, Oh, everything just changed.”
After the election, political reporters like Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer left the Post. Sports lost its share of MVPs, including Jenkins, who got an offer she couldn’t turn down from The Atlantic, and Dan Steinberg, a much-loved Post lifer who spent a quarter century at the paper before leaving for The Athletic.
There are a number of radical ideas that might have been tried in sports, each of which would have inflicted pain on a number of people. The paper’s top editors could have decreed that the section focus on national stories that might catch the eye of readers who came to the Post for their Trump fix. The section had analytics-driven “desk dives” that provided useful data—at least for writers willing to listen—but no stab at a sweeping reinvention.
Before the layoffs, the paper told Nationals writers not to report to spring training and, according to Puck’s John Ourand, told non-Commanders beat writers they wouldn’t go on the road. Road locker rooms nourish a beat writer, but the masthead could have tried something like that two years ago.
There are more radical ideas: Local beat writing could have been moved to metro. Maybe the model for Post sports could have been an opinion section—a good one, not Bezos’s tame section. Maybe a battery of podcasts and columns could have floated the enterprise stories and investigations the Post specialized in.
We needed visionary leadership, and we did not have anything close to that.Dan Steinberg
If the paper’s top editors had come toting so much as one of these ideas, you can bet there would have been a sportswriterly gnashing of teeth and then, shortly after, a sportswriterly lack of follow-through. The important thing to know is that these kinds of ideas were never presented to the writers I talked to. “I would be all about leading the way for us to try to do this in a different way,” said one writer. “But no, absolutely nothing was tried.”
“We were trapped in an in-between space,” said Steinberg. He added: “We needed visionary leadership, and we did not have anything close to that.”
Over the past week, Post sportswriters called each other and wrote job memos. Some asked about getting jobs covering other beats at the Post. They were told that it was all but impossible because the paper was trying to lay off a certain number of people. “I think I may have to get laid off if I ever want to work for The Washington Post again,” one sportswriter told me last weekend.
“There’s a lot of disbelief,” the writer continued. “You wake up in the morning, and you have to convince yourself that this crazy thing is actually happening. And it’s happening to everybody around you.”
There are two ways to think of The Washington Post without its sports section. First, consider the strategy of the Post’s decision to slim down and orient itself around politics and national security reporting. The Post is plopping even more of its business into a crowded bazaar where the paper already competes with the Times and the Journal and Politico and Axios and Punchbowl.
Moreover, what happens in January 2029 when President Gavin Newsom or President JD Vance gets sworn in? Wasn’t the takeaway from Trump 1 that the Post didn’t use the money it got from its resistance sugar high to create new products that attracted subscribers? People are not reading your stuff. The Post is committing itself to a strategy Lewis said was a flop. Are enough people going to pay to read this stuff when Trump goes away?
That’s the business end of killing the sports section. The moral dimension is something different. What the Post did to its section Wednesday is a bloodier version of what newspaper bosses across America have done to sports: cutting veterans at the same time they make their papers into no-fly zones for young talent, all the while maintaining a faint heartbeat inside the section so that true believers won’t cancel their subscriptions.
A sportswriter isn’t owed the right to fly to every game. Nor the right to file copy in the increasingly ancient language of 1980s newspapers. At the risk of sounding like something other than a hardened observer of media, I believe Post sportswriters deserved to be told by their bosses what they should have done differently and deserved a chance to execute the plan.
Asked how we got to the closure of the sports section, Jenkins cited the forces squeezing the entire media industry and, closer to home, “a perfect storm of complete managerial incompetence.”
Imagine a publisher who wanted to talk ball but whose editors didn’t try to adapt the ball writers’ words and audio and video for a new age. I’d like to think such a publisher wouldn’t have the right to preside over the closing of the Washington Post sports section. I’d like to think he’d be sent to the same Florida retirement community to which the Post refused to send the Nats writers. But there I go. I’ve fallen prey to nostalgia.
