Mike DiMauro: The New York Times is overrated

Jul. 13—It is called argumentum ad nauseam: constantly repeating an argument or a premise in place of better supporting evidence. A looser translation is that something becomes true if it's repeated often enough.

This has always been my stance — unlike most others in journalism — about how the New York Times, the "old gray lady," is the industry standard. I've never found that the Times distinguished itself from the Boston Globe or Washington Post, certainly not to the gushing of some in our profession, who think the Times' every comma is an echo from some higher order.

The "old gray lady" disgraced journalism earlier this week by disbanding its 35-member sports department. The Times will use writers from The Athletic, a Silicon Valley contrivance the Times bought in 2022 for more than a half-billion dollars. The Athletic and its 400 employees are not unionized and are subject to layoffs at any time. The Times sports staff was unionized and instead will be "redeployed" within the company.

Lest any of the old gray lady's apologists defend this move, please read the previous paragraph and decide if this decision was rooted in journalism — as the industry standard should — or simply the cold, the corporate and the cutthroat.

The Times' disdain for sports has always made it The Paper Of Record for the overly-intellectual, or perhaps pseudo-intellectual, who, if they hadn't just reminded you they just returned from a poetry reading in the Bois de Boulogne, would simply overlook your existence.

Or as the Boston Globe's Chad Finn wrote: "Sports was never a top priority at the Times, which sometimes acts as if it has data that revealed that 63 percent of its readers wear a monocle and use it to look down on sports as the pastime of the scurvy and the unwashed."

The Times certainly had some of sports journalism's giants (even though they no longer cover the Giants) including Red Smith and Dave Anderson. But it had a number of pedestrians, too. I know I've covered many events with representatives from the Times who left me disappointed.

I remember a man named Jack Cavanaugh, who would rarely fail to pronounce Nykesha Sales' first name wrong during postgame press conferences. Then there was Jere Longman, who enjoyed asking 142-word, big-picture questions to Geno Auriemma with 40 other writers on deadline.

This was after UConn won at Duke in 2003, the Huskies' first trip to play before the Cameron Crazies. Memorable night. Longman asked the first question to a packed media room whose inhabitants were on a vicious deadline.

"Geno, what did this game mean for women's basketball?" he asked, eliciting a number of groans.

It was here The Day's Vickie Fulkerson cut him off and asked a basketball question, thus making her the night's MVP.

I relate all this to underscore how the Times' highbrow ways were not always timely, appreciated, appropriate or carried out by someone who was a returning champion on Jeopardy.

Lately, the "industry standard" decided to forgo all professional beats in New York City. Imagine: The New York Times has no beat writer for The New York Yankees. Now I get that what the Yankees do nightly is mere baseball — fodder for the unwashed — but they are a multi-billion dollar entity with 40,000 fans watching and millions more watching on YES.

Sorry. Sports may be what Howard Cosell called the toy department. But the industry standard ought to be smart enough to pay attention to what sports tell us about ourselves and society.

The Times, in its story explaining the move to eliminate sports, promised "high-impact" enterprise sports reporting. Perhaps they could explain how that happens without reporters following teams and building the necessary relationships.

Our profession has many internal flaws, not the least of which is how ability isn't measured through individual talent, but by affiliation. If you write for the Times, you are a Rockefeller. If you are a local yokel, you must come from the cornfield on "Hee Haw." I've witnessed firsthand that, as the song from "Porgy & Bess" goes, "it ain't necessarily so."

I just hope other affiliations, even if starry-eyed about the old gray lady, understand the value of sports journalism. Readers care, whether it's a metro assigning a beat writer to the professional team or the local covering the high school football game. Kipling's words about newspapers apply to sports as much as any other department: "I keep six honest serving men; they taught me all I knew; their names are what and why and when; and how and where and who."

And that counts. Always will.

Meantime, Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur rather brilliantly summarized our modern business earlier this week in a column about the Times and journalism in general:

"Media is the best/worst business," Arthur wrote. "I have come to say that on an alarming number of occasions, usually in conversations among those of us still trapped in this critical, besieged, ruthless landscape. Journalists get to be curious, to discover and explain, to live what H.L. Mencken once called the life of kings.

"We also tend to be high-information people, so conversations often drift to the bad stuff: climate change, democracy, deadlines, and of course journalism. Then, as a colleague recently recounted, you talk to a civilian and they say 'I just spent two weeks in Cabo, it was amazing.' It's disorienting."

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro