Sports Illustrated layoffs

Didn't take very long for SI to regain its footing and leap back to the top of the sports journalism world.

https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/11/05/black-cat-metlife-stadium-giants-cowboys

 

And now it's a monthly.

Exclusive: Sports Illustrated will reduce print output to monthly

 

My subscription will never end.
The three week lead time is brutal - they use to close the night before printing. Honestly - no more coverage of championships. They may as well go back to nature, birding and essays on boating.

 

What a terrible decision. I guess I'll be letting my sub run out next year

 

It can still be a must-read for me with this decision. Really, every two weeks or every four weeks isn't that different, I don't think. What made SI so great in the past was that you had both amazing deadline writing and the great features and profiles. You had Jenkins on Notre Dame-Michigan State mixed in with takeout pieces. You had Kram on Ali-Frazier and then great profiles in same issue. I wanted to read McCallum on Game 6 of the Finals, mixed in with great profiles. Shipnuck and Bamberger days after a major. Rushin right after the 91 World Series. Those gamers are often as memorable as many of the features people remember.

But I think that was pretty much lost already once it ceased being a weekly. So as long as they can keep producing great features and newsy pieces, I'll still be reading. It sucks for the photography, because so many great shots were from a great event that finished a few days earlier. Three or four-weeks out now, are the covers all going to be profile type shots? If they do go the Vanity Fair route? Or maybe there's just a huge section inside with best of photography? Sort of like what they had at front of the mag but expanded? And great pics are timeless, so if they have something that hasn't been out there before from a game, I think it can still be a cool place for photography.

It's another slice into the SI of our memory and of our youth and from the mag that was one of the best in the country, but in the present I don't think it has to be a death blow and they can still do great work.

 

When they went to twice a month they said it would allow the mag to produce the kind of issues and page counts it was known for. So the 68 page weekly issues, jumped to 82 or so twice a month (still a loss in pages per month) and now they're back down to 68 pages every couple of weeks. I'd love it if it became meatier. More extra-long profiles or stories about corruption (ala The New Yorker). The history of the managing company doesn't really speak to that though.

 

Sorry but the sports world moves too fast for a three to four week lead time.

 

If you take a 30,000 foot approach and look at "big issues" like how the NCAA would implement players to collect on their own likeness, the changing economics of baseball, the future of the Olympics, why MLB wants to downsize the minor leagues, how many high school ath;etes are on "work visas" etc.

 

Sports Illustrated attempting to become the New Yorker strikes me as a 'smart' thing for them to do - the name probably still has some value. But as you say, the managing company doesn't give me any faith that they could execute it even if they tried.

 

Let’s imagine writing a piece about the NCAA and amateurism. You do exhaustive reporting. You get a great angle. You get it all ready. You close.

Now you wait a month and pray nothing changes. A month! That your source doesn’t talk to Yahoo or ESPN or the Times. Or that your source doesn’t declare he’s playing in Australia instead of going to Duke. SI becoming the New Yorker but with Vanity Fair’s deadlines strikes me as almost impossible.

 

What in the actual hell? Charlotte Wilder got paid for this? Unbelievable.