Patricia Nilsson writes in The Financial Times:

While The Athletic’s reporting has extended “beyond just match reports” to include more in-depth pieces, Douglas McCabe, media analyst at Enders Analysis, warned: ”If your entire business is sports journalism, this is a challenging period.”
The Athletic is not alone. Every media outlet was going to have to “think very creatively” about its sports coverage, Mr McCabe said.

It feels like the existential questions we’ve been thinking about in sports journalism in this new Coronavius world have revolved primarily around the content of sports journalism. What are we going to write about when the central focus of our profession isn’t happening? How are sports TV networks going to fill all these hours? What’s going to fill the sports pages? What are sports writers going to do in lieu of covering sports?

These are all valid questions.

But of course, there are economic ones to ponder as well. In the short term, what will the army of freelancers who rely on game coverage to make a living going to do - especially that unseen army of workers who man the cameras and production trucks at every sporting event?

Thinking longer term, what does this era mean for the economics of sports journalism? It’s not like the industry was economically thriving before all this happened. What happens when if/when the economy goes into a recession or worse? (For all the decades of mismanagement that plagued the newspaper industry, it was the 2008 recession that was the real fatal blow). The Athletic model has succeeded so far, but what will happen to a company that relies on VC funding and a huge market valuation if the entire economy falters? Will people still have the extra dough to throw around on a sports journalism subscription site? Even if they do, how long can sports media companies survive this time without sports?