NY Times Publisher Meets Staffers: It Didn't End Well

New York Times staffers were left fuming after their boss turned a deaf ear at a long-sought sit-down to complaints about the Gray Lady’s decision to disband the sports department, The NY Post has learned.

Times chairman and publisher AG Sulzberger agreed to meet with sports journalists on Thursday at company headquarters in Midtown– nearly a month after news leaked he was shuttering its sports division in September and replacing it with coverage from The Athletic, a sports news site it bought last year for a whopping $550 million.

Times higher-ups had outlined a plan to move the roughly 40 unionized sports journalists to different desks — and rely on The Athletic, which employs about 500 non-unionized workers, for daily coverage.

“The entire newsroom is outraged at how badly this has been handled and how poorly the sports staffers have been treated,” a source said.

Staffers at the meeting griped that many journalists have been reassigned to new beats “haphazardly” without much consultation and that some feel their goals and careers as sports writers have been flushed away by the paper.

“AG was very composed [during the meeting],” an employee told The Post. “He said ‘The Times faced a crossroads years ago and found ways to be innovative.’ He said: ‘We can’t be stuck in amber. We can’t keep trying to pursue this one model.'”

“It was a hard message to hear,” the source added, explaining that when staffers pressed the exec to promise that the paper wouldn’t repeat this strategy of acquiring other sites and replacing its journalists, he declined and instead emphasized to look at his “track record.”

“The most recent thing on his track record is he murdered the sports desk,” fumed another Times employee.

Insiders said the move — which came two months after Times management negotiated a new contract with the newspaper’s union, The NewsGuild of New York — was a sneaky, low blow that caught employees flat-footed.