Sports Illustrated Implosion Perfectly Encapsulates The Ugly, Ongoing Collapse Of U.S. Journalism

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Thu Jan 25, 2024, 11:05 AM - Edit history (1)

Sports Illustrated Implosion Perfectly Encapsulates The Ugly, Ongoing Collapse Of U.S. Journalism

Failures

from the hollowed-out-and-sold-for-parts dept
Wed, Jan 24th 2024 03:53pm - Karl Bode

When we last checked in with what’s left of Sports Illustrated, its owner, The Arena Group, had just got done baring its ass as part of a giant ‘AI’ related scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a great idea to create a bunch of fake, AI-generated writers to shit out lazy, uninteresting clickbait, without really telling any of the folks that create actual journalism at the company. ... When busted, Arena Group executives blamed everyone but themselves.

Sports Illustrated’s fortunes got even bleaker last week, when it was revealed that The Arena Group, which had actually only been renting the Sports Illustrated brand as part of a 10-year deal with Authentic Brands Group (ABG), had failed to make a quarterly $3.75 million payment to continue licensing it. That resulted in a revocation of the branding license and no limit of additional chaos for the already imploding company.

To hear ABG CEO Jamie Salter tell it, Arena Group tried to change the terms of the licensing deal and lower its payments mid-stride. Salter says they may still be able to strike a deal with Arena, or they may find another renter. But when it comes to sports reporting and Sports Illustrated, it doesn’t really matter at this point — as the brand has already largely become a zombie of its former self.

And, as is usually the case, employees doing the actual work were the ones who got to pay the price for their employers’ incompetence and bickering, with large swaths informed of layoffs:

{snip}

[viva la]

1. I used to love Sports Illustrated.

Some of the feature articles were amazing. They had writers who loved language more than they loved sports.



I used this opening by SL Price to teach sentence variety in a creative non-fiction class:

Henry Mull was 13 years old then, poor and sports-mad and hardly intrigued by the long view. Who is at 13? So, no, he never thought about the odd ways lives can meld—not in the hours before his neck got snapped, and certainly not in the hours after. Strangers sliced the shoulder pads and helmet off the Middleton Junior High quarterback and sped him through the streets of Tampa to the hospital, where more strangers shaved his head, their voices and faces and hands fluttering while he lay terrified. His mother hadn't arrived yet. "Am I going to play ball again?" he asked. Now someone was pressing a metallic device to his head, now eight grim-faced people were holding down his arms and legs. Whatever anesthetic they used, it didn't take. The boy screamed when they screwed the first four-inch bolt into one side of his skull, just above the ear. He kept it up as they twisted in the second, screaming all the way into blackness.

https://vault.si.com/vault/2009/08/24/three-lives-two-hits-one-happy-ending
It is about Nick Buonoconti's work for spinal cord research after his own son was paralyzed in a football injury.


THAT was great sports-writing.
What a shame it's gone.

[Aristus]

2. I've said it time and time again: If you have a business, for God's sake, don't hire a businessperson to run it.

Business people make the shittiest business decisions.