The Sporting News

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sporting News published its first edition on the 17th of March, 1886, in St. Louis, selling for five cents. For decades it stood as the only national newspaper in America devoted entirely to baseball, earning the nickname that said everything: "The Bible of Baseball." How did a single weekly newspaper born in a Midwestern city come to define an entire sport's culture? And what does its long journey from newsprint to pixels reveal about the way Americans have consumed sports journalism across more than a century? The answers run through family dynasties, radio networks, digital fire sales, and one very particular photographer who spent years wandering three New York ballparks with a camera.

• 2. Five Cents and a City

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  Alfred H. Spink founded the paper with a particular advantage: he was already a director of the St. Louis Browns baseball team, giving the new weekly insider access other publications could not match. The newspaper covered baseball, horse racing, and professional wrestling from the start, but its real ambition was national scope. Rival sporting weeklies like Clipper and Sporting Life operated out of New York and Philadelphia, cities with far more commercial muscle. By the time World War I arrived, both had faded, and The Sporting News stood alone as the country's only newspaper devoted to baseball on a national scale. The paper's early editorial voice was not shy about politics. When the American League began play in 1901 as a rival to the National League, the paper threw its weight behind the new league and its founder, Ban Johnson. Both the paper and Johnson pushed for reforms meant to clean up the game, opposing gambling at ballparks, discouraging liquor sales, and speaking against attacks on umpires. In 1903, TSN editor Arthur Flanner helped draft the National Agreement, a document that brokered peace between the two competing leagues and laid the ground for the modern World Series.

• 3. Portraits and Players

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  In 1904, a New York photographer named Charles Conlon began making portraits of major league players as they moved through the city's three ballparks: the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, and Ebbets Field. His photographs appeared regularly in The Sporting News and eventually became among the most lasting visual documents of baseball's early era. The Spink family extended its grip on the publication into a second generation in 1914, when Alfred's son J. G. Taylor Spink assumed control. Under his leadership, the paper introduced the first Sporting News Player of the Year Award in 1936, honoring New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell. That award became the oldest major individual honor in Major League Baseball, and it retained a distinction shared by few others: the winners were chosen by the players themselves. Coverage broadened past baseball as the decades moved. In 1942 the paper added in-season football coverage. By 1946 it had launched an eight-page football tabloid called The Quarterback, which was later renamed All-Sports News as basketball and hockey joined the editorial lineup. When J. G. Taylor Spink died in 1962, the Baseball Writers' Association of America named a new award after him, and designated Spink himself as its first recipient. That same year his son, C. C. Johnson Spink, took the helm. The paper marked a visual milestone in 1967 by publishing its first full-color photograph: a cover image featuring Baltimore Orioles star Frank Robinson.

• 4. Changing Hands

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  The Spink family's long ownership of the paper ended in 1977, when they sold to Times Mirror. Four years later, in 1981, C. C. Johnson Spink sold again, this time to the Tribune Company. A decade of change followed. In 1991 the paper shifted from a newspaper format into a glossy, full-color all-sports magazine. Digital ambitions arrived in 1996 when the publication began serving as a sports content provider for AOL, and sportingnews.com launched the following year. Tribune sold to Vulcan Inc. in 2000. Vulcan was led by Paul Allen, and within a year it had acquired the One on One Sports radio network, rebranding it as Sporting News Radio. In 2002, the magazine dropped the definite article from its name and became simply Sporting News. Vulcan sold to Advance Media in 2006, which placed the publication under the supervision of American City Business Journals. The paper's St. Louis roots, stretching back to its 1886 founding, were severed in stages: the relocation to Charlotte, North Carolina, where ACBJ was headquartered, began in 2007 and finished in 2008. That same year the publication moved to a bi-weekly schedule.

• 5. The End of Print

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  In December 2012, after 126 years, Sporting News published its final print issue and moved entirely to digital. The transition had been signaled the previous year when the organization announced a deal to take over editorial control of AOL's sports website FanHouse. The following March, ACBJ folded Sporting News into a joint venture with the U.S. assets of sports data company Perform Group. Perform owned 65% of the new entity, called Sporting News Media. The arrangement brought Sporting News into the orbit of Perform's other domestic properties, including a video syndication unit called ePlayer and the soccer website Goal.com. The magazine's Sporting News Yearbooks unit and NASCAR Illustrated were not included in the deal. Almost immediately after the venture was established, Sporting News laid off 13 staff writers. Perform Group acquired the remainder of the joint venture in 2015 and moved the site toward a more tabloid-style editorial direction. A new logo and website design arrived in 2016. Under Perform, the site replaced Associated Press articles with the company's own Omnisport wire service and began launching localized editions abroad, particularly in countries where Perform had rolled out its sports streaming service, DAZN. Perform Media president Juan Delgado described the goal as preserving the Sporting News brand's heritage while publishing content aimed at younger, social media-oriented readers. In September 2018, Perform spun out its consumer properties into a new company called DAZN Group, and the remaining sports data business was sold in 2019 to Vista Equity Partners, where it merged with STATS LLC.

• 6. Archives and Awards

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  In the summer of 2020, Lindenwood University of St. Charles, Missouri, acquired the archives of The Sporting News from ACBJ. The collection was described as containing more than 10,000 books on baseball, football, hockey, basketball, NCAA sports, and other topics. That December, DAZN Group sold Sporting News to a private investment consortium, which became Sporting News Holdings. The publication's awards program had grown into one of the most comprehensive in American sports journalism. Its Sportsman of the Year award ran from 1968 through 2007. On the 18th of December, 2007, the magazine announced New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady as that year's winner, making Brady the first individual to win the honor twice. Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals had also received the award twice, though his second came as a shared honor with Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs in 1998, the year of their celebrated home run chase. In 1999 the award went to an entire team, the New York Yankees, rather than any individual. In 2008 the Sportsman of the Year gave way to separate Pro Athlete and College Athlete categories; those were merged back into a single Athlete of the Year award starting in 2011. The baseball awards carried particular weight for decades: many fans regarded the TSN baseball honors as equal to or above those of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. The Sporting News Comeback Player of the Year was widely recognized as the primary award of its type until Major League Baseball created its own version in 2005.