S.L. Price was a newspaper guy, making his bones as a young reporter at the Sacramento Bee and Miami Herald in the ’80s and ’90s. He covered sports, but those publications also allowed him to dip in on other beats; one day he might be reporting from the Olympics, the next he would be in thick of hurricane coverage. “I loved working for newspapers so much,” Price said.
But in 1994, enticed by a significant salary bump, he left the world of dailies for a job at Sports Illustrated. It didn’t take long for Price to realize that he had reached a promised land. “It was the gold standard,” he recalled. Price spent the next 26 years at Sports Illustrated, authoring 47 cover stories and profiling the likes of Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, and even Barack Obama. For much of that time, the magazine hummed with all of its editorial horsepower.
“Everybody in the building was smarter than you, and they made you look better,” he said of Sports Illustrated’s salad days, when the magazine was still flush with advertising revenue, and its pages rich with high-quality journalism. Price and his colleagues were supported by a deep newsroom infrastructure and empowered by the financial strength of the magazine, allowing it to become “a hub of great ideas and daring journalism.” Whereas “the problem with journalism today,” he added, is that “so much of it is undermined subtly by this lack of confidence, fueled by a lack of money.”
There is little of that confidence remaining at the current iteration of Sports Illustrated, where morale among editorial staffers is low and disillusionment with management is reaching new heights. Like much of the print media industry, SI’s budget and ambitions have been casualties of the digital era. Its publishing frequency has dropped steadily since 2015, going from 50 issues annually to now just 12. Layoffs under former parent company Time Inc. depleted the masthead, ultimately leaving it with no full-time staff photographers. The decline has accelerated since 2019, when previous owner Meredith sold SI’s intellectual property to Authentic Brands Group. Weeks after the sale, Authentic Brands licensed the magazine’s publishing rights to Maven, a digital media company that later changed its name to the Arena Group.
Under Arena’s stewardship, SI has endured several rounds of painful layoffs and drifted further from its founding ethos. Once a bastion of long-form journalism, SI writers are now under increasing pressure to chase clicks. The magazine hit its nadir in the last month following a bombshell revelation about AI-generated content published on SI’s website, as well as a shake-up at the executive level that brought uncertainty about its future. No longer one of the premier destinations in media, current staffers are seeking greener pastures. “It feels like the worst that it’s ever been,” one staffer told me. “I don’t know a single person who isn’t trying to get out. When you read our press clippings, why would you want to work here?”
Patti McConville / Alamy.
Winter has traditionally been Sports Illustrated’s time to shine. From December, when the magazine unveils its Sportsperson of the Year, to February, when it used to release its annual swimsuit issue, the cold-weather season was when SI showcased its influence on the zeitgeist.
This past year has been anything but celebratory, with 2023 bookended by periods of tension. In February, the magazine laid off 17 employees, including top editors, further depleting a staff that was already stretched thin. And just after Thanksgiving weekend, SI suffered a considerable blow to its once-sterling reputation. Futurism reported that Sports Illustrated published product reviews under spurious bylines. The outlet said that it could not identify the authors who purportedly wrote the reviews, and that one of the author’s photos was available on a website that sells AI-generated headshots.
A spokesperson for the Arena Group blamed the reviews on a third-party company called AdVon Commerce. The spokesperson said that AdVon “assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.” AdVon, they said, had provided assurances that the material was written and edited entirely by humans, and that the writers had used pseudonyms. The Arena Group ended its partnership with AdVon and removed the content from SI’s website. AdVon did not respond to a request for comment.
Tom Kludt
Source link
