A big reason I was attracted to journalism was Sports Illustrated, which is, sadly, hanging on by a thread, with another round of layoffs announced on Friday taking out most of what the once-great magazine has left.
It’s actually been years since I’d put any real thought into SI, which used to be the highlight of my week when it arrived in the mail, usually on Friday.
After looking at the cover to see if we had a Gary Smith story that week, I’d go to the final page, to see what Rick Reilly had to say.
The notes columns at the front, the analytical pieces, the feature stories – I’d read cover to cover, and then wish I hadn’t, kind of like when you order pizza, eat it all, and then don’t have leftovers.
Ain’t been the same for a while now.
There was a brief time in the mid-2010s when I switched over to a digital subscription that was somehow better than the print, with links embedded in stories that would take you to source material, and then back – but the company decided that was too expensive, and made the digital version just a string of PDFs of the print magazine pages that were hard to scan.
With budget cuts affecting the staff and thus the quality of the content around the same time, I logged off.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.
The company got snatched up in a fire sale by a company called The Maven in 2019, leading to more staff cuts, and it’s been downhill since.
Of late, the news about SI has been about its awkward use of AI to produce content, and its owner’s willingness to slap the brand name on whatever product has somebody willing to send a few bucks its way.
“What I hate the most is that these corporate douchebags who have taken over the magazine view it just as a name now,” said Jeff Pearlman, the baseball writer who cut his teeth at SI, in a TikTok video in which he discussed the latest round of layoffs at the mag.
“That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name,” Pearlman said. “It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn. It’s something to put on whatever you can shove that thing on. That’s what it is now. Sports Illustrated has become nothing more than a way to attract people. It’s just so disturbing.”
It’s being bled dry, but that kind of thing has been happening all over the media industry over the past several years.
Our local papers here in Virginia have gone through a succession of corporate transfers that have the paper where I cut my teeth as a cub reporter, The News Virginian, based in Waynesboro, where AFP is based, now has literally no local reporters or editors on the staff, and a three-day-a-week circulation of 692.
The bean counters who run my alma mater haven’t figured out how to get people to pay to put the NV name on cruise ships, clubs or popcorn, but I suspect it’s not for lack of trying.
Back to Pearlman to wrap up the lamentation on the fate of Sports Illustrated:
“And now here we sit, the last of their name writers gone,” Pearlman said. “Now, basically an empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports. It sucks. It’s a dark day in sports.”
“The last of the name writers is gone” – but, you know, Pat Forde is still there.
I’ll agree here – the “Towering Fraud” isn’t a name writer.
ICYMI: Pat Forde
- Pat Forde didn’t write about the new ‘Towering Fraud,’ Jon Scheyer: Wonder why?
- UVA Basketball: ‘Towering Fraud’ Pat Forde gets one last lick in at Tony Bennett
- Stephen A. Smith, ‘Towering Fraud’ Pat Forde, snipe at Tony Bennett
- Pat Forde, the ‘towering fraud’ of the interwebs, takes his annual shot at Tony Bennett
- What’s wrong with Pat Forde writing about college basketball, and how to fix it
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Chris Graham
