From "Sports Illustrated lays off most of its staff, threatening iconic brand’s future" (WaPo).
I'm sure that the wokeness was what finished off SI, but a big contributor is the disgusting "financialization" of everything. You had a product that really was as much of a money-printing machine as any magazine. Its brand signaled the highest quality photographs and good writing, and it had even weathered the damage done by the internet to all magazines.
But instead of nurturing this incredible asset so that it continued to lay the golden eggs, some jackass finance guys, empowered by the no-interest money that our genius Federal Reserve has been pumping into the economy since 2008, used debt to buy out the magazine and promptly stuffed it into a portfolio and ignored it. Half-assed itinerant MBAs or consultants get shuffled in to "manage," but no one really cares very much because SI is just another asset in a basket of assets. Various managers rotate out and so eventually the only people who know anything at all about running the magazine are whatever office-bound weirdos stuck around through the decline (people with real talent were able to get out), and eventually the mutant SJWs or Wokies that are still left are the only people who can run anything, and they start in with the ugly swimsuit models and the "everything in sports is raciss" stories.
So, yes, they killed SI, but equally villainous are the parasitic finance people and the disgusting MBA business culture we have had since Bernanke and his ilk decided to flood the economy with low-interest credit. Our management and investment culture is wrecking the long-term prospects of the economy and destroying our ability used to produce quality products and services.
I have no idea how we turn this around, but we desperately need to or within a decade we REALLY will be indistinguishable from a third-world country.
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46 comments:
What about the swimsuit issue? There will be a disappointed group of trans athletes.
@rhhardin
Damn you; I came here JUST to make that comment lol
Another left-wing media outlet in trouble.
Oh well...
maybe IF they still did swimsuit issues of gorgeous gals instead of horribly huge hogs..
They'd STILL be making money?
I found a copy of the first issue of Sports Illustrated at my grandparents' vacation home. It had a color photo of a night baseball game (NY Giants, I believe), and featured the coverage of the Roger Bannister and john Landy racing the first sub 4-minute mile; that was the most interesting feature. I didn't realize that it was the first issue, and showed it to a high school teacher who never returned it. Wonder what it would be worth now, nearly 70 years later.
If only they put more chicks with dicks in the swimsuit issue this never would have happened
So the Fat Lady has sung?
You mean fat people in swimsuits ( ala Victoria secrets ) doesn’t sell magazines/clothes. Jordan Peterson was right, again.
"Sports Illustrated lays off most of its staff, threatening iconic brand’s future"
The staff WERE the threat to its future. Maybe I should go long Sports Illustrated.
"Go Woke, go broke"
It seems like something about SI changed a few years ago that may have turned off most of its mainly male audience. Go woke get broke, as the saying goes. Stupid progs ruined another American institution.
Maybe a Lizzo cover can save them.
It has been painful to watch the parting-out of the once mighty Time-Life empire. Henry Luce built a great engine of information, a mass-circulation factory of high quality and great breadth. I'm of an age where important milestones of my life in this civilization are marked by issues of Life, Time, People, SI and Discover. What an undignified end it has all had, broken apart like a stolen car in an alley, or speed-butchered like a rustled steer.
It might have survived but for the predations of Luce's successors, who decided to enrich themselves and their Wall Street friends by loading up the company with unsustainable debt. Unsustainable because Google and Facebook came along and vacuumed up all the advertising revenue that used to sustain thousands of magazines and hundreds of thousands of good middle-class jobs. There should be a special circle of hell reserved for this particular kind of destructive greed.
All that's left is the debris of the disconnected brands, owned by locust-capital cash farms and run by illiterate nobodies, squeezing the last nickel of pseudo-value out of a trademark that has no future.
Well that's unexpected I guess. I always liked looking at the Faces in the Crowd -- and actually knew one or two through the years.
Curious, I looked up who owned it. Time, Inc., owned it 'til 2018, when Time was sold to Iowa's Meredith Corporation (the company that published Better Homes and Gardens). At that time, SI was sold off to Authetic Brands Group, and that group awarded the Arena Group a 10-y license to publish SI. As noted above, Arena Group has missed a payment.
I wonder if the magazine is still profitable?
So now we know why Sports Illustrated has been running fake, AI-generated articles — “written” by non-existent humans with AI-generated images and bios—for months now.
I read a couple of articles on this with several dozen comments. Most lamented the loss because o their feelings for SI but only WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG. Almost no one praised the recent editions.
All my life people have been writing in, infuriated with Sports Illustrated for its one issue of hot women in bathing suits, and talking about cancelling their subscription.
For decades, SI would publish their letters, and young men would happily read the magazine and enjoy the swimsuit issue.
Then, one day, the editors at SI went woke as shit. And we had the 2022 swimsuit issue, and the 2023 swimsuit issue.
Get woke, go broke.
I doubt very much Cosmo or any of the women's magazines would be so actively hostile to their audience.
Woolworths
Schlitz
Sports Illustrated
Times are SO GOOD that almost everybody is laying folks off. The 70s were such fun that the dems brought them back.
Strap in, 2024 is gonna get sloppy.
Sports Illustrated Bud-lit itself.
For years the swimsuit issue was a huge money maker for SI - a magazine whose subscribers were almost all men. Then they decided to start putting thicc chicks and dick chicks in it. What morons.
Sports Illustrated Bud-lit itself by embracing the entire Trans-craze. What red-blooded sports-watching male wants to pick up a sports magazine and read articles or look at pictures of overweight women pretending to be men or vice versa? Hubby and I aren't big sports fans other than some college football, but one of us would occasionally pick up the swimsuit edition each year. We haven't done so in several years now. Get woke, go broke. Or, as a great philosopher once said, "Everything woke goes to shit".
I’m going to miss the Megan Rampino tributes and trans SI models.
There are many reasons other than going woke that broke SI and many other media outlets. I wonder if the decision to feature plus plus sizes and transgenders was just an acknowledgement that the ship is going down so let's just give a big old finger to our traditional audience for whom we have mostly contempt. The writing in SI at one time was fabulous, but I doubt the AI generated content has kept up that tradition.
It's always annoyed me that the people who work in the toy department felt the necessity of making themselves relevant by adopting the political and social stances of those who had no interest in them. Accept the fact you are working in the toy department, but strive to gain a reputation as lasting as Grantland Rice's, or Red Smith's or Dan Jenkins's. The list goes on. P. G. Wodehouse chose to write comedy, but even though his reputation has suffered dismissal by critics, he is still read and enjoyed by millions more than most of the social realists who were highly praised during Wodehouse's heyday.
And finally, never seek to mollify or appease your fiercest critics. They never have your best interest at heart and are gleeful at your collapse and disappearance. The most significant ongoing example of courting those who hate you are those politicians whom we call RINOS but are in many cases on Republicans because they know they couldn't get elected as democrats. They have earned the contempt of the democrats and the loathing of the conservatives who are paying attention.
I'm sorry about SI, but they didn't have to make humiliate themselves by prostrating in front of their enemies. What do you suppose the actual size of the transgender community subscribing to SI. Would I need more than one hand, one finger, could I count them on the fingers of an amputated hand?
Oh no! Anyway...
One of the ways to tell that a property is dead, at least to its prior audience, is when they stop complaining. Creatives get very upset when the fan base complains about what the creatives are doing with the property, often attacking their own fan base, calling them all sorts of names, taunting them, etc. Then when the complaints stop, the creatives declare victory. The problem is when the fans were angry they cared. When the fans are silent, they've decided the relationship cannot be saved and moved on. It is like going through the stages of grief, except acceptance is apathy. Then the creatives wonder why they keep losing money despite rave reviews from the "critics" and praises from the people who like what they've done despite them not actually, you know, buying anything.
I used to care about Sports Illustrated. Oh well.
Sports Illustrated - the Sears of magazines.
WHO would have thought? That features of fat sows and skirt boys would NOT gobbled up by cis-men?
I believe there were some people on the right who were trying to stop SI's swimsuit issue. Now the left has done it for them.
You would need a heart of stone not to laugh out loud.
Once, I gave my AmHist students an assignment to choose a dozen magazines or periodicals (from a list of about forty including SI), look through a recent issue, and answer a few questions, such as "is this a popular or scholarly publication?"
"Does it seem to have a political slant, and if so would you call it Left, Centrist, or Right?" (Too many had no idea what the terms meant.)
"Why might a magazine like Sports Illustrated be so cheap to subscribe to, compared to Sport History?" (Because SI draws millions of male eyeballs to the ads; SH only has ads for other academic publications, if that.)
The only SI issue I can recall that wasn't a swimsuit issue had an article about a pro football player whose hobby was miniature wargaming. He did Peninsular War stuff in 20mm
IIRC, and had some expensive looking terrain on his tabletop. Would have been in the late 70s - early 80s maybe?
I have no idea what the guy's name was, or who he played for. Lived out west somewhere.
"Sports Illustrated Bud-lit itself" cfs 3:50
A great new verb swims into my ken.
The fact that SI became famous for a swimsuit issue shows how irrelevant it was. Just like playboy, it seems no one was reading SI for the articles.
Myself, I stopped reading SI when the internet came along. And Cable TV. once you could see all the games/sports on TV, and ESPN was talking to the atheletes, why did you need a weekly magazine?
Especially when it was leftwing, and had lying Journopigs like Rick O'Rellly, who was always claiming to overhear some white person in sports say something racist.
I'm sure that the wokeness was what finished off SI, but a big contributor is the disgusting "financialization" of everything. You had a product that really was as much of a money-printing machine as any magazine. Its brand signaled the highest quality photographs and good writing, and it had even weathered the damage done by the internet to all magazines.
But instead of nurturing this incredible asset so that it continued to lay the golden eggs, some jackass finance guys, empowered by the no-interest money that our genius Federal Reserve has been pumping into the economy since 2008, used debt to buy out the magazine and promptly stuffed it into a portfolio and ignored it. Half-assed itinerant MBAs or consultants get shuffled in to "manage," but no one really cares very much because SI is just another asset in a basket of assets. Various managers rotate out and so eventually the only people who know anything at all about running the magazine are whatever office-bound weirdos stuck around through the decline (people with real talent were able to get out), and eventually the mutant SJWs or Wokies that are still left are the only people who can run anything, and they start in with the ugly swimsuit models and the "everything in sports is raciss" stories.
So, yes, they killed SI, but equally villainous are the parasitic finance people and the disgusting MBA business culture we have had since Bernanke and his ilk decided to flood the economy with low-interest credit. Our management and investment culture is wrecking the long-term prospects of the economy and destroying our ability used to produce quality products and services.
I have no idea how we turn this around, but we desperately need to or within a decade we REALLY will be indistinguishable from a third-world country.
I've followed this pretty closely, starting with the acquisition by Meredith ( RIP ! ). Frankly, there was no way for them to win (woke, non-woke, double-woke or anti-woke). It was just wasn't going to happen. That said: it has a history of wonderful writing and inspiring photography.
Think Road & Track or Car & Driver.
Time waits for no-one
Oh no! Where will skinny teen girls with big boobs find work!?
Anyway.
Interesting business model - by licensing off the rights, they effectively allowed the licensee to hold the magazine hostage. If it were more successful, the licensee could probably have held out on the payments to leverage a better deal.
Steve Wilson pretty much nailed it at 4:04.
Nothing lasts forever - they had a good run.
rcocean:
"...Rick O'Rellly, who was always claiming to overhear some white person in sports say something racist."
I didn't pay enough attention to know if your characterizion of Rick O'Reilly is accurate, but I remember him mainly as the source of a lot of truly funny back-page pieces - including one about former White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen in which a whole lot of the humor was based on Ozzie's accent, including Ozzie's anger at the way O'Reilly was having fun with it. This was the early 2000s and even then I was impressed with O'Reilly's willingness to go so non-PC.
Example: "We've got to fuccus!"
I just realized the guy I'm talking about is Rick Reilly, not O'Reilly. Are we talking about the same person?
It's the finance people running Boeing that are killing the company. They know nothing about airplanes and believe people are interchangeable just like widgets. Boeing used to be run by airplane people, not accountants. That's when it creates the 707, 727, 737, 747, 757, and 767. Now all those are gone except for the 737. The 777 and 787 programs were late and over budget, 787 by $10B. The 737-MAX program was raced into production without enough, analysis, review and testing.
The military derivative programs are also overbudget and late. Management doesn't believe what the engineers say is necessary for a successful program, push forward with the program, and then realize the engineers were right. At 100x the cost of what the engineers had said was necessary with years-long delays.
Sad, but inevitable. The wokiness did not help but the trajectory was clear. Weekly magazines based on current events are like blacksmith shops in the 1920’s.
Clay Travis has expressed an interest in buying the name and setting up an online subscription based publication under its name. It might work if they had a monthly publication with long form articles that were not time sensitive. Does the SI name still carry the weight to help make that a successful venture? It has been a long time since SI was relevant.
Not to be nitpicking, but what did the swimsuit issue have to do with sports, the mission of the magazine, it's right there in the title, other than being a money grab?
The woke swimsuit models sure did not help. But that was a dying model (sorry) for some time. Like Playboy, why pay to see semi-nude (SI) or completely nude (Playboy) pics in a mag when the internet has all that and MOOOOOOORE just a click or two away.
(Or so I'm told.)
The only SI issue I can recall that wasn't a swimsuit issue had an article about a pro football player whose hobby was miniature wargaming.
I remember the Sidd Finch story by Plimpton. That was pretty comical. But yeah, the rest of it is all a haze now.
"I remember the Sidd Finch story by Plimpton."
I recognize Plimpton, but have no idea who Sidd Finch is. (OK, thanks to Google I now know.)
My SI encounter was at my in-laws. My FIL and my wife's younger brother were devoted readers, and told me about the wargaming footballer.
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