Most of the staff has been laid off:
Much of the staff of Sports Illustrated, and possibly all remaining writers and editors, received layoff notices Friday, which essentially could spell the end of a publication that for decades was the gold standard of sports journalism.
Weird how something that’s been around so long just vanishes over night.
I can’t wait for the book! I suspect this is going to go down as one of the greatest examples of either colossal mismanagement (or fraud) of this decade.
That’s just unbelievable. It’s on par with the king of the catalog, Sears, not knowing how to survive in the era of everything being purchased via online catalog.
It needs to be a special leather bound edition, complete with commercial
Apparently it’s more profitable to run a chain of resorts and events than to report news.
Wow. My first guess was, “Leveraged buyout and couldn’t manage the debt,” but nope.
SI was sold in 2018 to Authentic Brands Group for a mere $110m. Their business model appears to be “buy a famous brand, then license it to someone to actually run.” They own Brooks Brothers, Nautica, Prince, Forever 21 and a bunch of other, similar brands.
ABG gave the license to Arena Group Holdings. They own a bunch of smaller magazines (Men’s Journal, Parade, etc). They describe themselves as an “innovative technology platform and media company with a proven cutting-edge playbook that transforms media brands.” Sounds like some shit Kendall Roy would say.
Arena missed their last payment to ABG, so ABG is just shutting the whole thing down. It’s hard to tell if the root is even related to SI, or just general upfuckery by Arena.
I’m going to guess that they will turn to AI generated stories and AI generated swimsuit models to reduce cost and improve profitability.
They already did. And got caught.
Oh my.
Guess there’s a chance the parent company will let someone else run SI again, but I doubt the people who were laid off will wait around.
Crazy that the same, ahem, ‘brand management’ company managed to basically kill two of the country’s longest-running brands in their respective fields: SI and Brooks Brothers.
Per Matt Levine’s latest column, the financial backstory to this is absolutely wild.
That’s some crazy stuff. I don’t understand the thinking behind the actions. The guy seems to have paid twice for the same company, probably overpaying both times, and then laid off everyone, thereby driving down the share price? It’s like an Elon Musk variant approach to wrecking a company!
What’s also weird is I get a daily news column from SI and it’s still coming out and multiple writers still seem to be writing content for SI. Perhaps the full-time people were laid off but SI is still limping along using contract writers?
Mismanagement aside, SI has always seemed a dinosaur to me. I’m older and love print magazines, but given sports coverage on TV (seemingly 24hrs a day) and local media I’ve never seen the value in their product.
Were you all subscribers? Do you think they retained enough subscribers to survive (minus the mismanagement)
I’m curious to hear about the magazine too, since I’ve never read it. Were there really interesting in-depth articles? Player profiles, that type of thing? I only ever heard about it every year because of the swimsuit issue for the longest time.
The classic era of Sports Illustrated from about the late 1970s through the early 1990s was one of the best magazines covering any subject out there. The stable of writers was impeccable – although very male, and they not only did great stories, they broke news, too.
They busted the door open in the early 1980s on the prevalence of anabolic steroids in the NFL with a huge cover story, with Lyle Alzado and Steve Furness both going on record as users and talking about the side effects. Their article on the effects of boxing and cognitive decline in retired fighters pretty much started the downward arc of that sport.
And yeah, the feature articles were often amazing. The now-legendary Frank Deford was a staff writer, and some of his long-form pieces in the magazine have ended up published in essay collections on the best writing of the 20th century.
More recently, SI was still breaking news. And maybe more importantly, giving really talented women a chance to shine. Emma Baccelieri had become one of my favorite baseball follows and writers, as an example.
Unless I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere I haven’t thought about SI on my own in at least a decade. ESPN is having problems and they actually have games and stuff to build around so I can’t see how SI even hung around this long with just reporting and stories. It’s obviously bad for those still employed but it was inevitable barring some genius new plan/direction.
SI was known for its fine writing, and its swimsuit issue. I still prefer written articles to talking heads droning on and on. So I will read something on a website but I don’t watch ESPN’s talk stuff. I don’t even like to watch video clips of their talk stuff. Give me the written word!