Sports Illustrated's mass layoffs announcement the last sigh in its sad demise
Sports Illustrated covers featuring Simone Biles, LeBron James and Joe Burrow. Credit: AP
Sports Illustrated might or might not survive as a business, what with it being a pawn in some sort of complicated corporate meshugas few of us understand.
So I will leave Friday’s news about SI's mass layoffs and an uncertain future after dizzying months of turmoil to the business journalists who follow this stuff.
(Long story short: Authentic Brands Group, which owns the publication, revoked the license of Arena Group to put out the magazine after it missed a multimillion-dollar payment.)
But beyond feeling awful for the journalists and other employees affected, the rest of us can let out another collective sigh over what has become of SI.
Even in a world in which legacy media companies have struggled to make money, or at least as much money as they used to, the decline of Sports Illustrated never will stop being a shock.
In its heyday, it had more than 3 million subscribers, and being on its cover was among sports’ greatest honors, especially for the Sportsperson of the Year issue.
The most recent Sportsperson of the Year was Deion Sanders, a selection that seemed almost intentionally designed to annoy and/or offend traditionalists.
But at least Deion is “Prime Time.” SI has become the late-night infomercial of sports publications, since early 2020 as a monthly. (I think. Who keeps track anymore?)
Friday’s latest depressing news was a long time coming. This did not happen overnight, and traces some of its history to missteps in the early years of the internet era, when SI made an ill-fated decision to favor quantity over quality.
Meredith Publishing bought SI in 2018 as part of the purchase of Time Inc., which started the magazine in 1954. When Meredith sold SI to Authentic in 2019, it went for a mere $110 million.
Authentic later struck a 10-year licensing agreement with Arena (then known as Maven), which was not able to return the operation close to its glory days.
And here we are.
“This is another difficult day in what has been a difficult four years for Sports Illustrated under Arena Group [previously the Maven] stewardship,” the union representing SI employees said in a statement.
“We are calling on ABG to ensure the continued publication of SI and allow it to serve our audience in the way it has for nearly 70 years.”
SI’s tarnished brand took another hit in November when Futurism reported it had published articles using fake names and profile photos generated by artificial intelligence. Hey, at least SI was participating in something cutting edge for once!
There is no overstating how weird all of this is for those of us who came of age in the 20th century.
Much as I admired Newsday, if someone had offered the chance to work at the publication of my choosing as a young sportswriter, I would have made the same pick as 94% of my contemporaries.
Sports Illustrated! Duh! In fact, there was a time Newsday acted as a farm team of sorts for SI, sending the likes of Peter King, Tom Verducci, Tim Layden and Ivan Maisel its way.
After the switch from biweekly to monthly print publication in 2020, King told Newsday, “It’s obviously not something that I wish was reality, but reality might have been the dissolution of the brand, the franchise.
“So for all I know, this was the only thing they could have done.”
Four years later, might there be someone out there who can do something else? Even after all the turmoil, the brand still has some meaning, and perhaps some value.
The news of the latest layoffs had “Sports Illustrated” as the No. 1 trending topic in the country on “X” by midafternoon.
That mostly was a nod to nostalgia, of course. But here’s hoping that someone out there takes it as a sign of something worth salvaging.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
