On Sports Illustrated

A few top-of-mind thoughts on today’s news that the generically named private equity vulture overlords who own Sports Illustrated were laying off virtually the magazine’s entire staff:

• First and most importantly, this is a truly crappy day for the talented writers, editors, and journalists working for SI. It’s easy for all of us who grew up reading SI, cutting articles out and saving them, putting covers on our bedroom walls, to lament what was and what used to be and the loss of this vibrant part of our professional origin stories. But the first focus should always be on people who just lost their paycheck. It reminds me of a Pete Townshend quote about the rock stars who died in the late 1960s and early 1970s: “They might be your f*cking icons, they were my f*cking friends and they’re dead.”

• A few months ago, I wrote about how the closing of The New York Times sports section was the loss of one of sports media’s totems, one of the symbolic structures that had so much meaning our profession. The effective shuttering of SI is that times 100. From that piece:

“Losing them is a disaster, the greatest misfortune that can befall the group.”

• Looking at this from an economic standpoint, the easy villain here is the generically named private equity firm that owns SI. Indeed, private equity companies owning news organizations does not seem to be working out so well at all.

• I want to step back a bit on the economic aspect, though. Because in many ways, weekly magazines like Sports Illustrated were the hardest hit media formats by the emergence digital and social media. To understand why, you have to go to the lesson I learned in grad school from Vin Crosbie:

  “The greatest change in the history of media is that, within the span of a single human generation, people’s access to information has shifted from relative scarcity to surplus, even surfeit.” (italics original)

  Magazines like Sports Illustrated were perfect for a news age of scarcity. In an era when your sports news came from the local paper and local TV (or the early days of ESPN), SI was the Bible. It was where you read coverage of the biggest stories in sports, the big games. It was where you saw photos that you didn’t see anywhere else. If you were a sports fan living in Buffalo, SI was how you read about the Oakland A’s or the San Francisco 49ers. But digital and social media have brought the age of information abundance, and so much of what what magazines like SI did so well doesn’t fit into this new world. Now, I don’t need SI to read about the A’s or the 49ers. I see great pictures all the time. Games are covered and broken down in real time.

• Veteran sports writer Jane McManus Tweeted this on Friday:

  

  As someone who runs a graduate program in sports journalism, this thought keeps me up at night. I wish I had a good answer.

• One of my operating assumptions about 21st century journalism is that the business model that fuels the industry for so long is no longer compatible with the world as it is (see the scarcity-abundance idea earlier). But what is deeply disturbing to me is that no economic model has replaced it yet at the scale that journalism requires. We’re still waiting, and too many people are losing their jobs while we as an industry wait.