Sports Illustrated layoffs

It’s great to see some piss and vinegar here once again

 

I don't agree that it is a screwed up business if someone can earn that to cover soccer. Your worth is your worth. If you are a good soccer writer and your work actually creates that much value via subscriptions and/or ad sales, the screwed up thing to me would be NOT being able to negotiate your worth.

I just don't get why it would be screwed up for a really good soccer writer to be that valuable, but it's not screwed up when someone from another profession is able to earn that much or more doing something else. I really do see a lot of hints on here of what @Double Down was saying. Just because most sports journalists don't command huge salaries, doesn't mean it's screwed up if one actually does -- which is what a lot of people seem to be saying. Any particular person's value is their value. None of this is charity.

In the case of SI in particular, go back to the beginning of this thread. SI effectively ceased to exist -- it was near death -- and after a series of sales, the name was bought by someone who licensed it to TheMaven/Heckman, who turned it into a content mill, a la what he did with Rivals and Scout. Except in this page out of his playbook, the idea seems to be to ride SI's name recognition to extract whatever value is left. A lot of cheaply-produced content (way below the standards of what SI used to do). ... with SI's name recognition hopefully still resonating enough with people to get eyeballs and bring in more revenue than the now reduced expense of producing what gets put on the site.

Wahl was a holdover from SI as it existed before that change. I can't say for sure why he wasn't axed when they came in and immeditaly got rid of a ton of talent and replaced them with their independent "content creators." I'd guess that when they got in there and looked at traffic, Wahl's stories were so popular -- beyond many of the people they axed -- that their calculus was that he would pay for himself. His value was his value to them.

It doesn't mean that Heckman wouldn't have liked to have had Grant Wahl while paying less for him if he could. His whole model depends on keeping content costs to a minimum.

The shutdown has brought a lot of uncertainty for a lot of businesses. Many have been forced to layoff or furlough people. Those with the financial wherewithal are paying people salaries that at the moment are not adding to the bottom line. It's fair to guess that TheMaven does not have that financial wherewithal, and in that case, it would make sense that given a crummy sense of circumstances, they may have felt forced to let people go or to say, "Hey everyone, we need everyone to take a 30 percent pay cut while this goes on."

If Wahl is telling the truth, Heckman said, "30 percent pay cut. ... which will be permanent, even if / when everything gets back to normal." And Wahl wasn't on board with that.

What was likely was that Heckman saw a chance to take that crummy set of circumstances and try to exploit it to reduce costs in the future if his company survives this and things get back to normal. And Wahl wasn't good with that.

Wahl likely didn't have very solid footing in a company like that. The ghost of Frank Deford wouldn't have a place in cheaply-produced content mill. The big question is the cosmic question of this board, and that is whether there is still enough demand for higher-quality sports reporting and writing that has someone like Wahl commanding what he used to be able to. I hope that things open up pretty soon and he can find out. It certainly won't seem screwed up to me if he establishes the same or more worth from someone else.