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Bye bye, Sports Illustrated?

Deej

By Deej
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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38127

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8 hours ago, pops said:

Their writing went to shit,  they lost all of their good journalists,  the internet happened. Perfect shit storm so they just started throwing shit against the wall to see if it would stick. 

I would guess I, along with most on here,  were their target demo. There are still magazines I get because I prefer them in that form over digital.  The content from si is not one of those. They were uniquely positioned to take on ESPN at the turn of the century in a way the athletic is doing as opposed to just scores and highlights and breaking news. They didn't. Sucks for nostalgic reasons, but not for anything they've done in the past 20 or so years. 

Correct. If we’re doing a post mortem, SI could have pivoted early to recruiting website stuff, streaming content like documentaries or hard knocks type shows, or draft king type revenue streams. SI was a national brand and it doubled down on print, which became outdated, and even online print became less profitable due to Twitter, podcasts, and vlogs. 

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31265

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I'm like brisket, I used to love magazines and had several subscriptions at any given time.  And SI was impressive just on the quantity of content, both photo and print journalism.

I never had a subscription, but roormmates did.  I only read it during college football season because I never really have given a rats ass about pro sports.

I am as guilty as anyone of abandoning print publications, but somehow I feel they will be missed eventually.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89409

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12 hours ago, RPM said:

Print magazines are less relevant in 2024 than iPods. It's the Sears syndrome. SI had a dominant position, even teaming with CNN to create a 24/7 sports network, but failed to keep it's market.

I would say print news magazines are mostly dead and have been for years, outside of olds and companies that automatically subscribe year-after-year for waiting rooms, etc.. 

I have subs for some magazines that are not focused on the latest news, and I write freelance articles here and there for a few that are not news-based, and most of them are doing fine, although there have been some consolidations/mergers in the past 5-10 years.  There are still plenty of niche magazines though that are doing fine, and production costs have dropped way down - it’s easy and cheap to layout a lot of magazines once you have some Adobe InDesign or whatever templates, and some magazines with decent circulation only have a handful of full-time employees - the editor will handle advertising, there will be a layout person (who maybe pulling double duty and helping with editing) and then there will be somebody handling subscriptions, support, etc., and they are paying freelancers for all of the actual content.

Printing is handled elsewhere and if you’re not news-based, you can have multiple issues in the pipeline and it’s drag and drop the articles and images in, make sure the advertising is current (paid for) and the promotional for other magazines or services are good to go,  and send it off, with the bonus of selling digital issues or providing them through Apple News, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, etc.

1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Correct. If we’re doing a post mortem, SI could have pivoted early to recruiting website stuff, streaming content like documentaries or hard knocks type shows, or draft king type revenue streams. SI was a national brand and it doubled down on print, which became outdated, and even online print became less profitable due to Twitter, podcasts, and vlogs. 

Exactly. It wasn’t the fat or trans swimsuit covers and anybody saying that hasn’t been paying attention to its very slow death.  SI had the money, staffing, and backing 20 years ago to have been a massive sports site here in 2024, and early on their online writing was great and they had plenty of info.  For reference, sites like rivals.com started in the 1990s and were sold multiple times.  SI could have picked up some early sites in the 2000s (and they in fact did) and could have built a full-blown portal that would be not only alive and kicking, but at the top of the heap.

They stuck to their print magazine too long, and they failed to pick up on the potency of sports Twitter and Reddit and other social networking sites, which had readership that dwarfed the magazine and probably SI.com’s numbers.

hell, the sites that replaced SI for a lot of people have all been talking about it

https://www.theringer.com/media/2024/1/19/24044671/sports-illustrated-obituary-redux

Quote

How many times can Sports Illustrated die? Or nearly die? At this point, evenone of SI’s AI-generated authors could probably write the magazine’s obituary. Name-check a few longform gods who once lived in SI’s pages. Evoke the pleasure of getting SI in the mail each week. Then, having reminded readers that SI is “storied,” describe something terrible that has been done to the current staff. Again.

On Friday, SI suffered another semi-death. To understand how it happened requires understanding that SI is no longer a publication per se, at least to its owners.

Quote

SI is owned by something called the Authentic Brands Group. SI is one of the brands it manages, along with Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, and Billabong. A second company, the Arena Group, published SI after licensing the brand from Authentic Brands. If you can follow all that, you’re a better media critic than I am.

As Front Office Sports’ A.J. Perez reported, the Arena Group missed a payment to Authentic Brands, meaning the licensing agreement is kaput. On Friday, the Arena Group sent an email to employees saying, “we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.” That sounded like an extinction-level event, the “big one” the L.A. Times Guild warns is about to visit its own publication.

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SI has been feasted upon so many times that, like ESPN, it can be hard to remember which round of layoffs a former employee fell victim to. In 2019, as SIcame under control of Maven (which became the Arena Group), it laid off more than one-third of its staff. Maven’s plan was to create an SEO content farm to exist alongside classic SI, or what remained of it. In one case, Maven solicited articles about the Bengals from a contributor it discovered was a senior in high school. Around this time, a company memo said SI was being “built for success in the 21st century and beyond.”

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Those rosy projections bit the dust somewhat short of the 22nd century. The next year, SI cut another 6 percent of the editorial department. A now-forgotten detail: After the late, great soccer writer Grant Wahl was fired, James Heckman, the CEO of Maven, claimed Wahl didn’t file enough copy! That year, Heckman crowed that SI foresaw a “profitable year.”

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On the contrary, it took a darkly comic series of management errors to bring SIto its latest semi-death. SI was not the first fat magazine to come unbound in the internet age. But at the turn of the century, SI’s name (I resist saying “brand”) was still extremely powerful.

Moreover, SI had a stable of writers—Peter King, Wahl, the late Paul Zimmerman, Stewart Mandel and Richard Deitsch (both now of The Athletic)—that leapt from the magazine’s pages to its website. They showed that SI could be a good and distinct online publication, too. SI’s recent stewards did something amazing: They made people forget that SI was a pioneer of online sportswriting.

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The Maven’s strategy of winning the internet was to publish writing that could be found anywhere on the internet. On Friday, Levinsohn resigned his seat on the Arena Group board and bemoaned the “destruction of Sports Illustrated’s storied brand and newsroom.” A lot of people would backdate that destruction considerably.

 

Edited by atomheartbevo
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RPM

RPM 26215

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CNN/Sports Illustrated (CNN/SI) was a 24-hour sports news network. It was created by Time Warner, merging together its CNN and Sports Illustrated brands and related resources. It was launched on December 12, 1996.

Other news networks like ESPNews, provided 30-minute blocks of news and highlights in a similar fashion to CNN Headline News at the time, but CNN/SI was live daily from 7am to 2am. Their purpose was to provide the most comprehensive sports news service on television, bringing in-depth sports news from around the world, and integrating the Internet and television.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89409

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10 minutes ago, RPM said:

CNN/Sports Illustrated (CNN/SI) was a 24-hour sports news network. It was created by Time Warner, merging together its CNN and Sports Illustrated brands and related resources. It was launched on December 12, 1996.

Other news networks like ESPNews, provided 30-minute blocks of news and highlights in a similar fashion to CNN Headline News at the time, but CNN/SI was live daily from 7am to 2am. Their purpose was to provide the most comprehensive sports news service on television, bringing in-depth sports news from around the world, and integrating the Internet and television.

And they were only in like a quarter of the homes that ESPNews was in as well.

SI followed the Newsweek model.

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RPM

RPM 26215

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3 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

SI followed the Newsweek model.

Like I said earlier, they followed the Sears model. Sears ruled the mail order business, but gave a half-hearted attempt at adapting to a rapidly changing marketplace. Prodigy and Discover were attempts to stay relevant, but stock market guys divided and conquered before the tech could take root. Bezos laughs at their ineptitude.

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BurntEyes

BurntEyes 5826

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38 minutes ago, Parliament said:

And the irony is Sears's mail-order model woulda slid right in to the internet era.  Circa 1999, move the giant paper catalog to the internet and BAM.  No Amazon.

Yeah, from a missed business model perspective this is right on point. Had Sears done this, with its already loyal client base and low revenue/investor paper tiger Amazon getting the dot bomb crash, Sears would be a multi-billion dollar company now.

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Captainant

Captainant 27442

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1 hour ago, Parliament said:

And the irony is Sears's mail-order model woulda slid right in to the internet era.  Circa 1999, move the giant paper catalog to the internet and BAM.  No Amazon.

 

24 minutes ago, BurntEyes said:

Yeah, from a missed business model perspective this is right on point. Had Sears done this, with its already loyal client base and low revenue/investor paper tiger Amazon getting the dot bomb crash, Sears would be a multi-billion dollar company now.

Brick and mortar retail is finally catching up with the online model and using their stores as mini distribution hubs. It's definitely made the in store shopping experience worse (especially at HEB, goddamn big ass red carts) but it's allowed most every store to offer an "amazon-like" next day shipping offering. 

Sears is SUCH an interesting case study in a powerful business failing to keep up with the times. Those motherfuckers used to sell entire houses by mail a hundred years ago! It's crazy that they couldn't keep up with the times

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13049

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10 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Exactly. It wasn’t the fat or trans swimsuit covers and anybody saying that hasn’t been paying attention to its very slow death.  SI had the money, staffing, and backing 20 years ago to have been a massive sports site here in 2024, and early on their online writing was great and they had plenty of info.  For reference, sites like rivals.com started in the 1990s and were sold multiple times.  SI could have picked up some early sites in the 2000s (and they in fact did) and could have built a full-blown portal that would be not only alive and kicking, but at the top of the heap.

They stuck to their print magazine too long, and they failed to pick up on the potency of sports Twitter and Reddit and other social networking sites, which had readership that dwarfed the magazine and probably SI.com’s numbers.

The 'woke' argument is exactly as you say--it's the knee-jerk comment that ignores what was SI's inability to spot the leak that was sinking the ship. I remember being a young reader and the advertising that my parents talked about some (IIRC, it was in the news)--the Bud Light dog (I think?) and the Joe Camel ads...and the long spreads each season with the run down on the teams (football, basketball, baseball, hockey) but with the internet and message boards and then social media, that just subsumed their relevance in that respect and their revenue.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89409

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2 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

...and the long spreads each season with the run down on the teams (football, basketball, baseball, hockey) but with the internet and message boards and then social media, that just subsumed their relevance in that respect and their revenue.

Yeah, they were the go-to magazine, and with such a short and easy-to-remember domain name of "si.com" they could have been the go-to website up through this day - something akin to TheAthletic.com, Rivals.com, etc., all rolled into one.  They should have embraced forums earlier as well, and cultivated that - sports fans love forums.

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C-Man

C-Man 27041

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On 1/21/2024 at 11:45 AM, pops said:

Their writing went to shit,  they lost all of their good journalists,  the internet happened. Perfect shit storm so they just started throwing shit against the wall to see if it would stick. 

I would guess I, along with most on here,  were their target demo. There are still magazines I get because I prefer them in that form over digital.  The content from si is not one of those. They were uniquely positioned to take on ESPN at the turn of the century in a way the athletic is doing as opposed to just scores and highlights and breaking news. They didn't. Sucks for nostalgic reasons, but not for anything they've done in the past 20 or so years. 

SI was not like most other sports publications in that it was more long-form, "color" writing. It was a weekly, not a daily so therefore the "live" events the mag would write about were already a week old by the time the issue got to your mailbox. Many times, writers were essentially embedded with the teams involved in the game through the front offices, the coaches, the players and so on. It was never meant to compete with ESPN in any fashion. Yes, there were feature-type articles as well and "Insider" note columns by their beat writers. It was the absolute pinnacle of sportswriting/photography for many, many years but I stopped getting it more than a decade ago and haven't missed it a single bit.

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Ignatius

Ignatius 4000

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

 

Rejoice, lords and ladies!  If you can get to one of Bennigan's locations in [checks listings...] Monahans or Borger, you can still get Steak and Ale's finest!

 

EBIz3gFWkAImsns.jpg

 

Fucking tossup as to which of those towns is a bigger shithole but I’ll give the crown to Monahans because Borger had some hot sluts on their volleyball team like 40 years ago…

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 104561

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Just now, Ignatius said:

Fucking tossup as to which of those towns is a bigger shithole but I’ll give the crown to Monahans because Borger had some hot sluts on their volleyball team like 40 years ago…

But.....philosophical question....now that BOTH towns have 1) a Bennigan's that 2) features items from the great Steak and Ale menu, can EITHER one truly be a shithole?

Take a few bong hits and ponder that one.

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pops

pops 6973

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1 hour ago, C-Man said:

SI was not like most other sports publications in that it was more long-form, "color" writing. It was a weekly, not a daily so therefore the "live" events the mag would write about were already a week old by the time the issue got to your mailbox. Many times, writers were essentially embedded with the teams involved in the game through the front offices, the coaches, the players and so on. It was never meant to compete with ESPN in any fashion. Yes, there were feature-type articles as well and "Insider" note columns by their beat writers. It was the absolute pinnacle of sportswriting/photography for many, many years but I stopped getting it more than a decade ago and haven't missed it a single bit.

Yeah,  my point was not to compete with them but continue to offer the long form embedded stories like the athletic or the ringer is doing now. Not to be a quick flyby. And maybe our attention spans are too short but had they not insisted on sticking with print and feigning interest in a website I think they could still be relevant. 

They could have even gone with a freelance model where you subscribed to si.sec.com or si.nfc.com or even si.couwboys.com where you got stuff tailored to your interests. It's all easy to say now..... who knows. 

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89409

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2 hours ago, rage-a-holic said:

My dad loved Steak & Ale. He wouldn't be caught dead at Sambos/Dennys/IHOP/Kips

Steak & Ale was a completely different class of restaurant.

1 hour ago, tbone_ said:

Steak and Ale was deluxe

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Rejoice, lords and ladies!  If you can get to one of Bennigan's locations in [checks listings...] Monahans or Borger, you can still get Steak and Ale's finest!

It’s coming back this April, first one in Minnesota, but one planned outside of Dallas.

https://steakandale.com/its-official-steak-ales-comeback-is-only-months-away/

Quote

The Tudor-style décor and vibe, so vital to the brand’s DNA, will be clear. The salad bar is coming back. The original logo is 100 percent replicated, Mangiamele says, and he took it a step further by commissioning floor tile that says “Steak & Ale established 1966” for guests to walk over as they enter the space. “I’m telling you, the people who love Steak & Ale, or the people who have never been to Steak & Ale, will be wowed by the atmosphere, the music, the vibe, the fun, the energy,” he says, adding many of these experience-forward qualities are “sorely lacking” in today’s casual-dining arena. In addition to the salad bar, Steak & Ale will offer tableside salad service and Irish Coffee. Simply, it won’t lack for flair.

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The menu will showcase a host of Steak & Ale classics, like the Kensington Club, Hawaiian Chicken, Steak Oscar, and baby back ribs. And there will be blackboard specials where Steak & Ale reintroduces items to gauge how consumer palates have changed over the decades. So expect tried-and-true recipes, made from scratch, at an affordable price point (another staple of the original concept), alongside a rotation of classics reimagined.On the beverage side, leaning into what Mangiamele likes to refer to as “new-stalgia,” will be a lineup of cocktail stalwarts, like martinis and old fashioneds—recipe and ingredient forward over novelty. Beer (ale) and medium to higher-priced wines will round things out.

 

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Foosters

Foosters 17727

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SI will always hold a special place in my heart. I lived overseas for 4 years as a kid, and my weekly SI and SI for Kids subscriptions were my only lifeline to the American sports world. Hell, we didn't even get CNN international until my last year there. They'd always arrive about 3 weeks late, but I'd read every article - even on sports I was not interested in. I'd cut photos out and tape them to my wall, and by the time I was in high school, most of my walls and even the ceiling of my bedroom were plastered in SI covers and photos. One of my proudest moments during childhood was drawing a picture of Troy Aikman in colored pencils and having it published in SI for Kids. Felt like a fucking superstar.

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Covri

Covri 6231

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I know we have to merge threads of same topics, but this thread is a mess to read as a result. And for all you pointing to the inclusions of a trans model in 2023 on the cover as going woke to their down fall, they had one in 2021 as well that I guess none of y’all heard about or noticed or weren’t told to be outraged over at the time.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 104561

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4 minutes ago, Covri said:

I know we have to merge threads of same topics, but this thread is a mess to read as a result. And for all you pointing to the inclusions of a trans model in 2023 on the cover as going woke to their down fall, they had one in 2021 as well that I guess none of y’all heard about or noticed or weren’t told to be outraged over at the time.

How did those models feel about the Monte Cristo?  Or the Kensington Club?  We need to know those answers before we can proceed any further on this subject.

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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38127

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39 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

How did those models feel about the Monte Cristo?  Or the Kensington Club?  We need to know those answers before we can proceed any further on this subject.

I’m a Turkey O’Toole man myself. 

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Bateshorn

Bateshorn 9898

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Posted (edited)

As somebody who had  a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second in the sun in sports writing, I'm pretty confident in sayin SI did itself no favors during the Deadspin era by being stodgy garbage.  And I say that as somebody who did most of my writing as eulogies of baseball players from the golden era. They were late to the importance of Moneyball, the changing CFB recruiting and conference landscape, how we consume sports, just everything.  In some ways, the O.G. swimsuit issues are reflective of their problems:  They didn't really adapt even to ESPN in the 90s.  They just kept pumping out swimsuit merch as soft core spank bank material instead of innovating their business model to be multi-media. By the time they realized they needed to adapt, societally we had all moved on.  Easy internet porn and the death of the Silent Generation and Older boomers did the rest. 

This Family Guy quip kinda nails it:

 

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orange dream

orange dream 1241

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My uncle gave me this calendar for Christmas 1986.  April and especially February are most etched in my memory. 

That water droplet (you'll know it when you see it) was of particular interest to me.

 

image.png.4da0a728411e6b80dbf4787bfe5f9222.png

image.png.8edcf524728a411353df17c9d7b31338.png

image.png.2e2fcd65c1e0a7e50322866399fb2f3d.png

 

Sad day if SI is really done.  Not so much for the current content but for the memories it holds in our collective minds.  My 10 year old has been going to the mailbox looking for it every day even though I have told him it's probably not arriving.

Was the final episode the Michigan over Washington cover?

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