Sports newsletters at The New York Times
Reporting
Oscar Garcia, Sarah Ziegler, Bill Pennington, Andrew Das and Jonathan Ellis
Email Graphics, Engineering, Design & Production
Jared Ellison,Mimi Fang,Joey Lee,Maya Neria,Sarah Klein,Eric Rabinowitz,Hana Suhail,Matthias Gattermeier,Brian Foshee andAlex Chao
From 2021 to 2023, my team at The New York Times worked with the Sports desk to develop custom newsletters for major sports events. Over the 2 year period we created custom newsletters and newsletter graphics for the Olympics (Tokyo ‘21, Beijing ‘22), The Baseball Postseason, The Superbowl, World Cup (2022), Women’s World Cup (2023), March Madness (2023), the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, and handful of major golf tournaments.
The newsletters were programmed with the newsroom and included editorial commentary from reporters (often on-the-ground), featured articles selected by editors, and custom graphics produced by our team using the latest results and data from StatsAPI, our sports data provider.
In 2023, the Times disbanded its Sports desk and with it also our newsletters. Working with the Sports desk was super fun - they were passionate about the report and were always looking for ways to connect to readers with punchy editorial and news ideas about graphics and newsletter programming. The newsletters were often edited by hand every day with editors hand-picking stories and selecting teams and players to highlight for the day’s newsletter send. Using our sports event data, we’d offer a preview of “Matches/games to watch” the day before (or day of) and the results of the match/game after the next day. One of the major highlights of our collaboration was our custom tournament bracket component that, as far as I know, was a unique offering of the Times.
Below are just a few examples of newsletters our readers might have gotten during these major events.
