Report: NYTimes To Suspend Printing Sports, Travel Sections

With no major sporting events and barely any travel happening due to the coronavirus, The New York Times plans to stop printing hard copies of those sections in the storied newspaper's Sunday edition and replace them with a section focused on life while sheltering in place, according to cheddar.com citing internal memos and sources.

In a note that will be sent out to employees this week, executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joseph Kahn told employees the Travel section of the newspaper will be replaced with a new section called At Home which will debut on Sunday.

In addition, the Sunday Sports section will no longer be printed separately and will be folded into the front section of the newspaper. Additional travel-related stories could live throughout the paper.

“The extraordinary nature of this moment has driven remarkable changes in our journalism,” the note reads. “It has also caused us to rethink the way we produce traditional elements of the news report and, in particular, the structure of the print newspaper.”

The Times’s average print circulation for weekdays (Monday through Friday) is approximately 443,000 and is 918,000 for Sunday. The sports section usually is combined with the business section of the Times, but is a separate entity on Sundays and Mondays. Travel is printed on Sundays. Sports Monday will still continue to be printed during the pandemic.

In total, the Times had 5,251,000 subscriptions across its print and digital products in over 225 countries at the end of 2019, according to SEC filings.