Sports Illustrated layoffs

A person deserves to make whatever anybody is willing to pay him. I've always been on the players side, rather than the owners side, in any labor dispute.
But my reality that this is a screwed up business if anybody is willing to pay a guy $350,ooo a year to cover soccer. Especially for a publication that wouldn't exist anymore without the swimsuit edition.

 

I don't think he's a shitty "person" either ... it was an unfortunate series of events. And I have an opinion about it!

 

I can’t think of anything positive to say about James Heckman. Not ever.

 

Can't everyone be right here?

FACT: The scumbags running Maven are among the worst people on the planet, so well-versed in a zombie-like ability to crash and burn only to rise again and get the opportunity to fuck up increasingly more sacred institutions in bigger and broader ways that they should all be running for president. I hope no one else on this board has the personal experience I've got with them.

FACT: It's bad form to exploit a pandemic to institute permanent pay cuts and layoffs you were gonna do anyway.

FACT: Grant Wahl was right to point out the shittiness of Maven's "plan."

FACT: It's a bad idea to badmouth your bosses, who have a decades-long track record of needing no excuse to shit on people, especially anyone making a decent wage and ESPECIALLY anyone making an outlier wage earned through decades of high-quality work.

FACT: The optics are bad when you verbalize your discontent with your bosses when you are making an outlier wage and enjoying outlier access (as evidenced by the "can't everyone get good quotes in the mixed zone" tweet) and you are being asked to take a 30% paycut that will still leave you making a lot more money than 99.9 percent of the people in your industry, which was dying more by the day even before the pandemic hastened its unavoidable demise.

FACT: THIS DOESN'T MAKE MAVEN RIGHT. It just makes it more likely other people in the industry, all of whom are vulnerable and making far less than Wahl, will not argue he was making too much but declare maybe he should have piped down and been content with a slightly less healthy bird in the hand, because too many of us have nothing but stale bird shit in our hands right now.

FACT: This also made it far easier for Maven to paint itself as the slighted good guy, simply looking out for the interests of the many at the expense of the one who was not willing to sacrifice a little bit during the pandemic.

FACT: By responding as he did, Grant Wahl played right into the hands and plans of the Maven scumbags, who are evil and awful but not quite as stupid as they look. Wahl had already publicly (and correctly) criticized Maven. But he had not been laid off with a severance earlier this month. Therefore, wasn't it possible, if not likely, that Maven realized it could save a lot of money by not laying off Wahl but informing him (and everyone else still standing) that there would be no severance packages after July 1, and hoping this information would be the rope with which Wahl hung himself and thereby saved Maven tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars? Maven SURELY knew how much he was making, and SURELY knew his wife likely fares very well, and SURELY knew he was not only the type to take a principled stand at a time like this but also could afford to do so.

FACT: Almost NOBODY knew what Grant Wahl was making before yesterday. Now they do, because Maven blurted it out as part of their smear campaign designed to prove just how slighted a good guy they really are (bad grammar here, sorry) and to get many of Wahl's peers in the industry to reflexively think he should have piped down and been content with a slightly less healthy bird in the hand, because too many of us have nothing but stale bird shit in our hands right now. Maven "executives" are well-versed in being greedy and getting a lot of money for not doing anything at all. Now they got to act all pious and superior by painting someone as...greedy and getting a lot of money for not doing anything at all. Kind of like Trump gets to do when someone says something stupid or non-sensical or gets busted for sexual assault.

FACT: It's a masterful bit of gaslighting, or the closest thing to masterful assholes like these can produce. The topic today should be how awful and despicable Maven is and how they are continuing to gut an institution and doing so under the guise of trying to keep the ship afloat during unprecedented times, when the truth is they would be doing this even if some dude never ate a diseased bat. Instead, we're arguing amongst ourselves. America! We've all done a great job here! If we ever get out of this, I, for one, look forward to the discussion when they snap up what is left of The Athletic.

 

Wonder how Pat Forde feels about all of this. It sure seems as if he was used as a bright shiny object -- "Look! We hired someone good and paid him lots of money!" -- to distract from the dismemberment of just about all the rest of the quality.

And, with what Ross Levinsohn did before he got to SI, no one could plausibly claim he/she did not see this coming.

 

I have no idea whether this was all directed at me, or just the part after my name. Just in case all of it was ... First, I'm not a journalist resenting one of my own. I'm not a journalist at all. I'm a former journalist who, like Wahl, was booted in essence to save a company money because I in fact was paid far above what the market suggested I should be. I knew that all along, too, and was grateful for what I got, kept my head down and did my job, until getting whacked. The company I worked for never replaced me and a couple weeks ago in fact slaughtered nearly its entire editorial staff. I believe they will take their CARE money and pocket it, when it should have gone to the folks they dismissed. Where Wahl is concerned, I am squarely in the "he deserves whatever he can get" camp, and have said as much.

I promise I am not taking "a known media scumbag" as anything, because prior to this incident, I had never heard of James Heckman, much like I had never heard of Grant Wahl. But given my dealings with publishers throughout my life, I'm not likely to side with one, and I haven't here, other than to say that anyone who owns a company is going to shitcan someone who blasts said company on social media. And it's not just a-hole publishers who will do that. That shitcanning is going to happen even faster when that employee is followed by nearly a million people. I feel bad he got canned and I bet he wishes he'd never tweeted things he did.

I don't begrudge the money Wahl was being paid. Not at all. I do begrudge him handling things the way he did when people are literally dying all around us. Not just losing their jobs, or their houses. Dying. By the thousands. And he's worried that, what, he might only be able to afford six Benzes instead of seven? That strikes me as a little a little insensitive. Instead, maybe he could have merely been glad he had a job, be it for minimum wage or $350k, because nearly 7 million people in our country freshly don't have them anymore, a number that will continue to grow in huge ways in the coming weeks, and not because they sent stupid-assed tweets about their bosses. In many cases, their bosses are part of that 7 million-and-counting right with them. And this is what I have been on about throughout the thread: the appearance of it all. I don't care how much Grant Wahl, who four days ago I didn't know was a person, made or what he did to make it. The appearance of crying about having to give some back, an amount that left him still making a quarter-of-a-fucking million dollars a year while people all around me, and I would assume all around him, are terrified of losing everything, is just a dick move. I'm sorry for Grant that his apparently sucky ex-publisher outed his compensation. But he know how much he made before he made a stink about it and took to Twitter.

 

I agree that both sides screwed this up.
But my point was about a soccer writer. (I stopped reading SI long ago after being a 40-year subscriber.) Who is he writing for? Is he writing for Americans, who mostly regard soccer well below your examples of golf and tennis? Or is he writing for a European audience? How much impact does SI have in Europe? If you think an American soccer writer is worth a third of a million bucks, you're out of your mind.

 

Its nearly double the median salary of MLS and more than what US soccer pays the womens national team. Whatever thats worth as comparison. Not perfect since American soccer is minor leagues but still interesting

 

Keep telling yourself that any sacrifice Wahl would have made would have gone anywhere other than to Heckman’s own performance bonus.

 

If you think a soccer writer is worth less than a tennis writer in 2020 you're out of your mind.

 

Who is telling anybody that?