Washington Post reportedly won’t send beat writers to Nationals’ spring training

The Washington Post has told its sports section not to book travel for beat writers Spencer Nusbaum and Andrew Golden to cover Nationals’ spring training, according to the New York Times‘s Erik Wemple.

Wemple noted that it’s unclear how the Post plans to cover the team without sending reporters to spring training, which is typically essential to understanding how a roster, coaching staff, and organization take shape over the course of a season.

Beat reporting depends on the kind of access and relationships that only develop when you’re physically present. Remote coverage means relying on whatever gets said in scheduled Zoom calls and secondhand quotes from other outlets’ reporters who actually made the trip, which is a fundamentally different — and worse — version of what beat coverage is supposed to be.

This comes just days after the Post canceled its Winter Olympics coverage two weeks before the opening ceremony in Italy. The paper had already spent more than $80,000 on housing alone, secured 14 credentials for reporters and photographers, and approved all the associated expenses, according to the NY Times‘ reporting. Then managing editor Kimi Yoshino sent an email on Jan. 24 informing staff that their coverage plans were being scrapped. The Post has since reversed course, ultimately deciding to send four reporters to cover the Games after initially pulling the plug entirely.

Whether the same kind of reversal happens with spring training coverage is less certain. Skipping Nationals spring training affects a much smaller, more regional audience, which probably makes it easier for Post leadership to justify the decision internally, even as it undermines the quality of baseball coverage that readers have come to expect from the paper.

On Saturday, Puck’s Dylan Byers reported rumors circulating inside the Post newsroom that the entire sports desk could be shuttered, with the foreign desk also expected to face deep cuts. The sports department that once produced some of the most influential voices in American sports journalism — Shirley Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins, Christine Brennan — now faces an uncertain future as the paper continues to lose money and talent.

Nusbaum and Golden are trying to plan their spring training coverage while simultaneously wondering whether they’ll have jobs in a few months, let alone the resources and support to do those jobs effectively. Spring training starts in roughly three weeks, and the Post‘s current plan appears to be having its beat writers cover the Nationals remotely from Washington.

For now, Nationals fans and Washington Post readers are left wondering how the paper expects to provide quality coverage of a team undergoing a complete organizational overhaul without sending reporters to the place where that rebuild is actually taking shape — and whether this is just another cost-cutting decision that will get reversed after enough public criticism, or if it represents the new reality of what sports coverage looks like at a legacy newspaper trying to cut its way back to profitability.