From Bethesda Magazine: A conversation with Steven Ginsberg

The executive editor of The Athletic discusses great journalism, the popularity of women’s sports and the heartbreak of being a fan

January 24, 2025 10:51 a.m. | Updated: January 24, 2025 4:22 p.m.

On any given fall Sunday, you can usually find Steven Ginsberg on the sectional in his living room with his laptop open and the TV on. Like tens of millions of people around the country (and the globe) he’s a huge football fan, but for the executive editor of The Athletic, Sundays are hardly a day of rest.  

In a fractured media world, The Athletic has become the website fans turn to for information on the players, teams and issues that fuel their devotion. Founded as a startup in 2016, it was purchased by The New York Times Co. six years later. In January 2023, Ginsberg became its first executive editor.  

“A football Sunday for me generally starts early, to make sure all of our coverage is set,” he says. “I tend to watch football for most of the afternoon and evening. I have the NFL package, so I can watch a lot of the games, and also RedZone. We publish stories after most games and then bigger takeaway pieces as the night goes on, so [there’s] a lot to do on Sundays.” 

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At first glance, Ginsberg was a curious choice. A lifer at The Washington Post, he covered business and transportation as a reporter, then led some of the paper’s political coverage. It wasn’t until he became managing editor there in 2022 that sports fell under his realm. But aside from a reporter’s doggedness and an editor’s eye for detail, he possesses perhaps the most important asset for the job: a rabid passion for sports. 


About:

FROM: Onancock, Virginia
LIVES IN: Chevy Chase, D.C.
AGE: 52
COLLEGE: Bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Virginia
OCCUPATION: Executive editor of The Athletic. Previously worked 28 years for The Washington Post in a variety of roles
FAMILY: Wife, Amy Joyce; sons Sam, 17, and Jonah, 14


It’s been an enduring affair. When he was a toddler, his family moved from New Jersey to the tiny town of Onancock on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where he grew up a displaced fan of the New York Yankees and the Giants. (He’s also a fair-weather Knicks fan, he admits.) After three decades living in Washington, he’s become a backer of the Nationals and Capitals as well.  

While none of those allegiances impacts his work at The Athletic, which has a newsroom of about 500 people spread across this country and England (where football has a whole different meaning), they are an unshakable part of him. Watching sports is an important portion of his workday, which usually begins with a morning soccer-focused Zoom from the basement of his Chevy Chase, D.C., home with the United Kingdom-based staff and ends with him doing the critical work of monitoring sports at night. On Oct. 13, after watching the resurgent Washington Commanders fall to the Baltimore Ravens with his father-in-law, he ended his day on that sofa in the living room. His wife, Amy Joyce, a former Post writer and editor who opened Wonderland Books in downtown Bethesda in December, and their two sons joined him to see his beloved Giants drop a snoozer of a game to the Cincinnati Bengals. 

“It was brutal, like so many Giants games,” he says. “I am only happy that my dad wasn’t alive to see it.” 

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Bethesda Magazine spoke with Ginsberg on the front porch of his home in October. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Were you the type of kid who was always reading the sports section? 

I was. The first great journalism I read was Sports Illustrated. My uncle got us a subscription when I was 8, 9, 10, something like that. I loved Sports Illustrated. We got The New York Times in my town, but you got it two days late by mail. But at that time, The Virginian-Pilot was a really good paper from Norfolk, and they had a good sports section, so we read that, too. 

Do you have an early memory of when one of your teams broke your heart? 

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Like any good sports fan, I have a lot of those. The Yankees lost to the Dodgers [in the 1981 World Series], and I remember being pretty heartbroken about that. My dad lived and died by the New York Giants, and so my first 13 years we died a lot. When I was 14, they won the Super Bowl. That was amazing. But at that time in Virginia, you never saw your team. You couldn’t follow them closely. So a Yankees game or a Giants game was an intermittent thing for us. If they made the postseason, you put all your energy into that. And then if they lose, it breaks you apart. 

When did you start becoming interested in journalism? 

In high school, there’s this thing in Virginia called Model General Assembly, where they sort of fake the general assembly, and high school students do it. When I was a freshman, I went as a reporter. And when I came back, I wrote something that said, ‘That was really great. I love being a reporter.’ 

When I was a junior in high school [in 1989], we took a class trip to the Soviet Union. This was an unbelievable adventure that my government teacher organized. I’ve never met anyone else who ever did that. When we came back, she asked me to write the story for a local paper about the trip, which I did. From that, [I learned] the power of not just telling people something that happened, but taking them someplace they can’t go and sharing a story they wouldn’t have known. I really love that. 

You started at The Washington Post as a copy aide in 1994, just a few months after you graduated from college. What did that job entail? 

At that time, there were five editions of the Post that printed every night. The newsroom was on the fifth floor, and the printing presses were on the third floor, so five times a night I would go to the third floor, get the newspapers, and bring them to the fifth floor and pass them around.  

Probably the most stressful job I ever had was I had to put in the lottery numbers. You had to watch TV at like 10:58 p.m. or something and get the numbers off TV and then plug them in. You can’t get the numbers wrong. 

How do you go from that type of job to becoming a reporter at the Post

It wasn’t easy. When I started there in 1994, there was a workplace column that they were taking [Associated Press] copy from once a week. I switched to the business desk and answered phones dayside. When I got there in ’95, I asked the editor, ‘Can I take a shot at writing one of these columns?’ And this guy, Vince Rinehart, was just terrific about it and gave me a chance to do it and worked with me on it. 

And from there, they asked me to do a career track column for twentysomethings, I think because I was the only twentysomething there. After three years, I still had to somehow become a part of the newsroom, so I applied for a summer internship—and I didn’t get it. So I stayed one more year, applied again, and didn’t get it. So I planned to go do something else. But in April, the person who runs the internship program called me and said, ‘One of the interns has carpal tunnel and can’t make it, and it’s too late to get anyone else. Do you want to have the spot?’ This is after being there four years. I was able to hang on after that and ended up staying 28 years. 

You covered business, government and transportation as a reporter at the Post. What were some of your biggest scoops? 

I had a couple. I broke news about Eli Lilly coming to Prince William [County], which at that time was a huge thing. Most of the news I feel like I broke was on the transportation beat. At that time, they were rebuilding the Wilson Bridge, the Springfield mixing bowl, the ICC, the Purple Line, all of those projects.

The Purple Line—talk about a perpetual story. 

Yeah, there was a point where I counted up how many Post reporters had covered the Purple Line, and it was in the teens. I was the latest in a long line.

Why did you decide to make the switch to editor? 

I was asked to do it. It’s not something I was ever really thinking about. I love being a reporter. I like writing. But the opportunity to lead coverage and have broader impact was appealing. One thing I loved right from the get-go is working with other reporters and helping them hopefully do better work. That I didn’t know going in, but it was immediate. I fell in love with that.

Steven Ginsberg (center, with microphone) speaks at The Washington Post’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize celebration while his sons watch.
Steven Ginsberg (center, with microphone) speaks at The Washington Post’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize celebration while his sons watch. Photo courtesy Steven Ginsberg.

Over the course of your career, you have been involved with seven Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. Do one or two of them stand out? 

I’ve been very lucky. The Post is filled with super-talented people. As an editor, you get a chance to be part of it. The big one that we did at the end was about the Jan. 6 insurrection. The stories we did on Roy Moore, the would-be senator [from Alabama]. It was a great time to be at the Post

If you look at those Pulitzer-winning projects or any successful project, what do they have in common journalistically? 

I think there’s a few things. One, you need reporters who are relentless. You can’t get some of the way there, right? You have to go all the way. You want a framework that takes you beyond the kind of narrow, specific thing. On the Jan. 6 one, we felt like we had to [report on] everything that happened before, during and after it. Not just answering the specific questions within it, but the totality of it. Is this part of something bigger?

You were the senior politics editor from 2011 to 2017. That was a period of drastic change in American politics. What was it like to be covering politics during such a radical shift? 

It was awesome. It was also a time of radical change at The Washington Post. In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the Post, and what people don’t realize is that before he came, we had a very small political staff. At that time, it was maybe 20-ish people. After he came, that more than doubled. 

So politics itself was changing, but I was able to hire a bunch of people and build out a staff to go at it. There was something really great about that because you’re not forcing people to do something different and trying to get them to think differently, you’re bringing on a staff built for the moment and adding to it. 

It’s important to come to politics with the knowledge you have, but it’s also really important to be open-minded. I always felt like whatever people in America are thinking, whatever candidate is going to be most in touch with that will win. So the most important thing is to figure out what people in America are thinking. We traveled a lot. At one point we had reporters from everywhere in the country, including Alaska. I think that gives you a natural understanding of the country that you can’t get if you don’t live it. We have people from rural areas, urban areas, suburban areas, different backgrounds, you name it. We brought together the best from a lot of different perspectives. And then you try and create the right conversations every day and go get the stories.

The sports section came under your purview when you became managing editor in 2022. Did your experience in politics help you in sports in any way? Do you see any similarities between sports and politics? I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of America, and I’ve always mostly seen them through politics and sports. [Those are] two very different prisms. I think sometimes because there’s a winner and loser in both, everyone thinks they’re kind of the same. 

There are some parts that are similar. If someone has a debate in politics or a game in sports, some of the coverage looks similar, but you’re going at it in different ways. You’re asking different questions. You have more license with sports. If a coach has a bad game, a player has a bad game, you say that they had a bad game in a way that’s harder to do in politics. There are more stats. There’s more accountability, really. And you can talk more directly to the audience in sports. 

Was it hard to leave the Post

Yeah. It’s hard to leave people that you’ve been working with and have known your whole life. I met my wife there. But I still live here and I still see them and talk to them. Professionally, it wasn’t that hard. I was ready for a new challenge. 

What was it about the opportunity at The Athletic that you found so intriguing? 

Well, I was a subscriber. I loved The Athletic. I thought it was one of the more inspired startups that’s come along. I’ve always had a little bit of startup envy. A startup inside The New York Times is pretty special. You kind of, in my mind, get the best of both worlds: the startup culture, but with all the resources and institutional knowledge of The New York Times.

You started as executive editor of The Athletic in January 2023. Six months later, the company laid off 20 journalists. In the note that you sent to the staff you said, ‘The goal was to broaden coverage to meet audience interests with a shift away from having one beat reporter for each sports team.’ Why the shift? 

It was a continuation of a shift that had been going on for a while. The Athletic had covered I don’t know how many colleges and teams, but pretty much all of them. There were some that were not working, so this was an effort to figure out which ones really work and which ones don’t. We felt it was important to prioritize the ones that were. We still cover around 100 teams. It’s not like we’ve pulled out of local news. We’re very committed to the beats. At the end of the day, the foundation of The Athletic is built on that, but it’s not worked in every market. So sometimes you have to acknowledge that. 

What’s it like working with such supremely talented veteran sports journalists as Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark? 

It’s fantastic. They’re very competitive, and I love that. Our baseball team has 20, 30 of the best sports reporters in the country. And when someone like Ken or Jayson or Tyler Kepner works with one of our beat reporters, when we all team up, I don’t think anyone can come close to us. So as editors we’re always trying to figure out where can we get the right combinations to do the story nobody’s doing.

Steven Ginsberg at work, watching soccer in his kitchen
Steven Ginsberg at work, watching soccer in his kitchen in Chevy Chase, D.C. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

When you look at your metrics, what is the top sport people click on? 

It’s football, football and football. College, pro and Premier League. It’s no secret that the NFL is the biggest sport in the U.S. and the Premier League is the biggest soccer league in the world. And we cover both intensely. But that said, I think we have top-notch coverage of the NBA, NHL, MLB, college sports. We’re able to get a pretty good audience for all of them, but the NFL just has more fans.

Women’s sports are experiencing quite a renaissance right now. Are you seeing an increased audience demand for coverage of women’s sports? Are you boosting the resources you put toward covering them?

Yeah. The Athletic has a great tradition in women’s sports. We intentionally cover them in the same way we cover any other sports. We don’t pile them all into a women’s sports group. We cover the WNBA the same way we cover the NBA, with a team of reporters. We cover women’s hockey, women’s soccer, basketball, golf, tennis, and we’ve been doing that for a long time. We continue to grow it. Caitlin Clark and the WNBA has obviously been the big story for basically a year now. And so we put more resources toward that. We cover women’s soccer, including the NWSL and some in the U.K. We’ve seen what everyone’s seen: There’s just a lot of interest in it.  

What do you like about living in this area?

My wife and I are both from small towns. And even though we’re in the nation’s capital, it feels very small town. When we came to look at this house all those years ago, there was a lemonade stand in the middle of the street and kids on their bikes. … It feels very small town even though it’s in the middle of the city. My wife and I go to Buck’s [Fishing & Camping restaurant] all the time. That’s a favorite. We go to Bethesda a lot. I often go to Bethesda Bagels on a weekend and get home before everyone wakes up with hot bagels. 

Are your kids big sports fans? 

They’re huge sports fans. They’re both big baseball fans, but Sam, the oldest one, also watches golf, tennis and the NFL in that order. Jonah is more NFL first, then baseball. But the one that they’re both obsessed with is soccer. They watch Premier League soccer every weekend. I’ll come in sometimes and they’ll be watching a third league South American soccer game with two teams that I’ve never heard of. 

What do you think of this area’s fandom? 

You have to grade it on a curve a little bit because the teams have been so bad. The football team [was] sort of unrootable. I know that the fans around here are so hungry for a good team, and they seem to have one now. So I think when that happens, they’ll be as rowdy and as excited as any fans anywhere. The Nats’ fans are great. The Capitals are great. The Wizards have been tricky.   

What does a winning team bring out in a community? 

Sports are one of the, in my view, last shared things that we all do together. … It’s a way for people to come together to have a shared experience. When you have a run like the Nats did, it’s special. We went to the parade. My kids are Nats fans, so for us personally, it was a magical run. I think for the community it felt like a moment when the region came together, and that’s something that really only sports can do. 

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.

This appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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