Important Note:
Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1
The passing of an old friend
Posted at: Jan/25/2024 : Posted by: Mel
Related Category: Perspectives, Sports,
I know I am dating myself, but I would like to briefly reflect on the apparent passing of an old friend. Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s one of my memories was racing to my best friend’s house every Thursday afternoon to see who was on the cover of the latest edition of Sports Illustrated (SI). Each new week was filled with glossy photographs and what I considered exciting writing. Sports Illustrated was likely one of the first things I read that was not assigned by a teacher. A few days ago the parent company, Arena Group announced that they were pulling the publishing license and shortly thereafter SI shared that they would be doing mass layoffs making any sustaining future very unlikely. In my youth, weekly magazines such as Time, Life, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated were the common way to stay informed. Those cool sports moments of Jack Nicklaus, Wilt Chamberlain, Bart Star, Mickey Mantle and a host of others were made memorable by the amazing photographs and the exciting stories that followed. I have to confess; I never had a subscription of my own. My friend Chris and I all went over to Doug’s house to inhale the latest edition. We would pass it around admiring the sports moments and periodically reading parts of it aloud. In retrospect, I guess that by the time Doug’s father got his hands on it, it was far from pristine. I have never been a sports junkie, but I wanted to be able to talk the talk with my friends growing up. That meant knowing who just threw a 65-yard touchdown pass and how many rounds it took for Frazier to win a unanimous decision over Ali in 1973. I was not smart enough to understand it then, but the writing was witty and anecdotal while still being substantive. I know this because my dentist of the 1980’s always had a handful of recent issues available in his waiting room. The SI writers of that era had a knack for immersing the reader in the drama and anxiety of the sports moment they were sharing. Much like a teenage boy seeing the cover of a Playboy magazine, the enticement to open the latest SI all began with the cover. The cover was always a single image in high gloss of some great sport moment that recently happened. This hook grabbed you and from there and you had to open the cover and read all about that cover story and then more stories that you stumbled upon. I suspect that the cover was even more important to the athletes. I can remember numerous sports interviews where the background included a framed SI cover on the wall of the same star being interviewed. Clearly, you hadn’t really achieved sports fame until you made the cover of Sports Illustrated, a coronation of sorts. I suspect that eventually the demise of Sports Illustrated will become a case study in an MBA program. Like many things that fail, there are a number of poor decisions and things that go wrong, but there are some things that are common to many other failing enterprises beyond just SI. High on the list is that new management took over the magazine several years ago. Typical of the era, venture capitalists (The Arena Group) swooped in and used the magazine’s great name to sell resorts and sports betting operations and other products that had nothing to do with sports journalism and the core audience. It was like handing management of the Louvre to a P.T. Barnum. Labor disputes followed along with a number of wholesale management turnovers. This is unfortunately a story that is not unique to SI. There is probably a cautionary tale here. A successful business with a respected brand being viewed as a piggy bank for others to draw from. This makes it sound like corporate meddling undermined the foundation of Sports Illustrated, but it may also have been a business model that had outlived its time. Buggy whips come to mind, but there is also the question… ”who reads anymore?” I suspect that I am part of the problem as well. I have really only bought an issue of SI once, that was while stuck at the St. Louis airport for a 4-hour layover. As mentioned, I am not a super addict sports fan. Nevertheless, it has always been important to me to be able to participate in the proverbial “water cooler conversation” at work. Cable television gave me an easy solution. I could watch 30 minutes of ESPN every Sunday evening and be ready to talk the weekend sports highlights the next day at work. Hmmm… Interestingly I recall that ESPN is also going through significant layoff. It is unfair to exclusively blame the venture capitalist. The few times in recent years I picked up an SI I found the writing stale and uninformative. The writing reminded me of fast food; bite-size tidbits designed for readers with short attention spans. There was just nothing insightful or exceptional about the content. It appears that along the way good writing and reporting gave way to advocacy journalism. Years ago, I was told that advocacy journalism was unethical, but journalistic ethics appear to have gone the same path of the buggy whip mentioned earlier. I saw a story a while back where Charissa Thompson, while working as a sports sideline reporter for SI was let go after she admitted that she had made up quotes from coaches. The last time I thumbed through a copy of Sports Illustrated it was clear that it had gone woke; its writers pushing a political agenda. This is the same virtue-signaling black hole that Disney and ESPN fell into. In each case the viewing/readership found this behavior obnoxious and even condescending resulting in declining revenues. It is interesting that whether business or entertainment, people continue to demonstrate that they are offended at being told how to think. While revenues continued to decline as if to pull one too many blocks out of their Jenga tower, in November 2023 SI admitted that an article with the bi-line of “Drew Ortiz” was in fact written by AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Drew does not really exist. Alas, after 70 years we may be witnessing the death throes of Sports Illustrated. It spent most of its life as a weekly publication, but in recent years moved to bi-weekly and then monthly. It would be easy to blame venture capitalist and short-sighted management. There is plenty of opportunity to also point to the apparent decline of journalism, and particularly sports journalism. Obviously, in an era of instant gratification and overwhelming media choices a weekly/monthly print source just isn’t pertinent anymore. More than likely, all these factors matter and while a venerable and once-great institution, Sports Illustrated appears to have out lived its time. OMG…I’m of a similar age, hopefully I can stay viable and useful for a while longer.
Comments (0) [Add Comment]
