Sports Illustrated

[Sea Ray]

Sports Illustrated looks like it's going through some major turmoil.


The fallout: On Friday Arena told SI employees in an email “… We were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI related properties has been officially revoked by ABG. As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.” According to SI union sources, severed guild members will be given 90 days’ notice (during which time there remains the chance that the licensing deal is resolved); and laid-off non-guild employees will be let go immediately. As of midday Friday, there remained massive confusion about the depth of the layoffs, but at a 2 p.m. staff call it was made clear: Anyone left in 90 days would be laid off, unless the licensing issue was resolved.


https://frontofficesports.com/sports-illustrateds-publisher-lays-off-entire-staff-future-unclear/

I guess no swimsuit issue this year

[Roy Tucker]

Looks like there had been some AI-generated article hijinks.

https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

[Reds Freak]

I was a longtime SI print subscriber but watched the quality, content, and frequency decline so much in recent years that I canceled after they cut it down to one issue a month.

[Bob Sheed]

Same pattern, different company.

[Larry Schuler]

Like the saying goes “If you hurt my boner, you’ll be a goner.”

[Bob Sheed]

If yew ain't first, yer last.

[Mutaman]

20801

[GAC]

It was THE magazine for boys growing up in the 60s. That and Baseball Digest (lol). I had subscriptions to both.

[UKFlounder]

It was THE magazine for boys growing up in the 60s. That and Baseball Digest (lol). I had subscriptions to both.

I never really could decide between Sports Illustrated or the Sporting News. I really enjoyed both and had subscriptions to each st various times, especially when TSN was in a newspaper tabloid like format. I enjoyed its “insider” type columnists before the internet came along

[cumberlandreds]

It was THE magazine for boys growing up in the 60s. That and Baseball Digest (lol). I had subscriptions to both.

It was in the 70's too, at least for me. I can remember when I subscribed to it and would so excited to receive it in the mail. I would read it from cover to cover almost as quick as I received it. But over time I grew tired of it. I thought much of the writing grew stale and sensationalized. I don't remember now when I dropped it but I moved on to the Sporting News as just pure baseball and sports coverage in general. I really don't know how a magazine can stay in business now with everything at your fingertips through the Internet? It really is something that has gone to history.

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/3/cincinnati-reds-johnny-bench-march-13-1972-sports-illustrated-cover.jpg

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/3/cincinnati-reds-johnny-bench-1976-world-series-november-01-1976-sports-illustrated-cover.jpg

[Sea Ray]

I too moved from SI to the Sporting News because I felt SI had become the People Magazine for athletes. I didn't care to read these long articles of a writer following an athlete for a day, telling me what kind of coffee they drank or what they did at 10am. I wanted sports talk and stats

[Roy Tucker]

I’ve told the story before but here’s the short version. My dad was in the advertising biz so he was comped subscriptions to lots and lots of magazines including SI and the Sporting News.

SI was the magazine of well written stories of all kinds of sports and I loved the magazine and the writers. But the Sporting News was where you got statistics in the pre-internet age. As a teen, I’d sit for hours and just pour over all the stats of all teams in both leagues. Just mostly triple crown stats but at least a place to read all the stats. There was no other place to get all that data unless you got the local paper of all the MLB cities. I believe they also had all the box scores of all the games. I was a real baseball geek.

[GAC]

I never really could decide between Sports Illustrated or the Sporting News. I really enjoyed both and had subscriptions to each st various times, especially when TSN was in a newspaper tabloid like format. I enjoyed its “insider” type columnists before the internet came along

I forgot. I had a subscription to SN too (lol). That's where all my paper route money went.

[RedsBaron]

At various times in the late 1960s and most of the 1970s I subscribed to SI, the Sporting News, Baseball Digest and Sport magazine. More recently I again subscribed to SI for a few years but I dropped it a few years ago. Each magazine had its strengths and weaknesses. SI sometimes had terrific writing, but other times could be shallow, and at times boring. As others posted, TSN decades ago was about the only place to get baseball stats, but its writing was generally inferior to that of SI. Baseball Digest was old school. Sport magazine probably had the best biographic articles of the bunch back in the 60s but was the first of the quartet to shut down.

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20801

I still have that issue somewhere. I think I also have the 1976 issue with Bench on the cover.

[GAC]

I didn't know this because I haven't avidly followed SI for years. But I read an article yesterday that it really cost SI when they went "woke" on the SI swimsuit issue.

I didn't post the link because I didn't want to further the discussion here, when it may belong on the poltical side. ;)