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End of the NY Times Chess Column
October 12, 2014
At the bottom of the New York Times Chess column online today is this sentence:
This is the final chess column to run in The New York Times.
A year or so ago, there was a potted history of chess reporting in the NYT:
From a column by Dylan Loeb McClain, published in the NYT April 21, 2013:
Champions Come and Go Over 50 Years of Columns
In November 1934, Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of The New York Times, wrote to José Raúl Capablanca, a former world chess champion:
“Dear Mr. Capablanca: After full consideration of the proposal, we have come to the conclusion that space conditions are such that we cannot consider the addition of another department at this time. We are grateful to you for making the suggestion and should there be a change in the situation I shall notify you of it without delay.”
The proposal that Markel turned down was Capablanca’s offer to write a chess column for The Times. Twenty-eight years later, The Times hired Al Horowitz, an international master, to write the column that Capablanca, who died in 1942, had proposed.
The first one appeared on April 16, 1962 — 50 years ago last Monday — and concerned a victory by Donald Byrne, an international master from the United States, over Vassily Smyslov, a former world champion from the Soviet Union, at an Argentine tournament.
In his last column on Aug. 27, 1972, Horowitz wrote about the 17th game of the world championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. Fischer won the title four days later, but Horowitz had become too ill to write about it. (He died in January 1973.)
Horowitz was succeeded by Donald Byrne’s brother, Robert Byrne, a grandmaster who was then the reigning United States champion. Byrne wrote the column for the next 34 years; he retired in 2006, but the column did not.
_______
For the record, the last column was about Caruana’s victory in Round Six of Baku 2014 over Peter Svidler.
I used to love reading about Fischer victories in Al Horowitz’s feature in The Times.
___________
The Washington Post ended its column in 2010:
The Washington Post has ended its chess column written by Lubomir Kavalek. The final column, which was published Jan. 4, noted that Kavalek covered chess for the newspaper for 23 years. Kavalek said in a telephone interview that the column began in 1995 and that before that he had written about chess events, beginning with the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov.
The column appeared on the Post’s Web site. It had once also appeared in print, but had been cut back last year to just the Web as part of the newspaper’s efforts to reduce costs. A source at the company with knowledge of the situation said that the decision to discontinue the column altogether was a further cost-cutting move.
October 12, 2014
At the bottom of the New York Times Chess column online today is this sentence:
This is the final chess column to run in The New York Times.
A year or so ago, there was a potted history of chess reporting in the NYT:
From a column by Dylan Loeb McClain, published in the NYT April 21, 2013:
Champions Come and Go Over 50 Years of Columns
In November 1934, Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of The New York Times, wrote to José Raúl Capablanca, a former world chess champion:
“Dear Mr. Capablanca: After full consideration of the proposal, we have come to the conclusion that space conditions are such that we cannot consider the addition of another department at this time. We are grateful to you for making the suggestion and should there be a change in the situation I shall notify you of it without delay.”
The proposal that Markel turned down was Capablanca’s offer to write a chess column for The Times. Twenty-eight years later, The Times hired Al Horowitz, an international master, to write the column that Capablanca, who died in 1942, had proposed.
The first one appeared on April 16, 1962 — 50 years ago last Monday — and concerned a victory by Donald Byrne, an international master from the United States, over Vassily Smyslov, a former world champion from the Soviet Union, at an Argentine tournament.
In his last column on Aug. 27, 1972, Horowitz wrote about the 17th game of the world championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. Fischer won the title four days later, but Horowitz had become too ill to write about it. (He died in January 1973.)
Horowitz was succeeded by Donald Byrne’s brother, Robert Byrne, a grandmaster who was then the reigning United States champion. Byrne wrote the column for the next 34 years; he retired in 2006, but the column did not.
_______
For the record, the last column was about Caruana’s victory in Round Six of Baku 2014 over Peter Svidler.
I used to love reading about Fischer victories in Al Horowitz’s feature in The Times.
___________
The Washington Post ended its column in 2010:
The Washington Post has ended its chess column written by Lubomir Kavalek. The final column, which was published Jan. 4, noted that Kavalek covered chess for the newspaper for 23 years. Kavalek said in a telephone interview that the column began in 1995 and that before that he had written about chess events, beginning with the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov.
The column appeared on the Post’s Web site. It had once also appeared in print, but had been cut back last year to just the Web as part of the newspaper’s efforts to reduce costs. A source at the company with knowledge of the situation said that the decision to discontinue the column altogether was a further cost-cutting move.
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