Zoom out: The last 10+ years have seen the hollowing out of storied publications like Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, the end of ESPN's magazine and Grantland and the erosion of local newsrooms' sports sections before the Washington Post announcement. The New York Times cut its sports section after it acquired The Athletic in 2022 - one of the few reporting-driven publications that has emerged in the current sports media landscape.
Predicting the future of journalism with any precision may be a fool's errand, though the broad - and mostly bleak - contours are obvious enough: local news will still face collapse; public trust will continue to buckle under the twin pressures of social media brain rot and partisan echo chambers masquerading as "news." AI experimentation will carry on, though previous overinvestment will hopefully cool, and most of the genuinely useful applications will be internal tools.