This year's SI swimsuit edition cover model is ...

I don't know the last time I saw an issue in print.

 

If this was 1987 and the SI Swimsuit Edition was still one of the key pieces to entry-level pron for adolescents like Club MTV and Kiana's Flex Appeal I may feel different but 2023 me doesn't care. Do whatever you want and, if people don't like it, no one forces them to buy. You want younger and more attractive? Sweet. Instagram has people showing much more and for free.

 

I don't know why the new owners moved the issue to May. February was the sweet spot. Kind of a dead zone with advertisers, post-Christmas, not a whole lot going on etc. It received a ton of attention.

 

Did they move it to May before or after SI went from weekly to monthly?

 

I wonder if Billy Joel would.

 

Holy shit this is spectacular.

 

No, no ... that was All For Leyna. Not Martha.

 

I took my daughter and her best friend to the library last week. They're old enough to run amuck (relatively speaking, it's a library) so I left them in the kids/young adult section, went to the periodicals and read the SI baseball preview. It was pretty depressing to see the magazine a shell of its former self and there were at least a handful of pieces written by people who were almost surely laid off before the issue hit the newsstands, such as they are.

 

I've subscribed to SI since 1988, and I still get it, though I find less and less to read every month. By and large, the magazine nowadays lacks depth of coverage, the writing is good but not great, the photography is a little above average. By "lacks depth of coverage," I mean that you don't find the deep dives into the athletes and characters, there is little to no investigative journalism, and there's almost no coverage of anything outside of the NBA, NFL, College Football and a few MLB articles. With regard to the NBA/NFL/CFB/MLB coverage, nothing distinguishes SI's work from anywhere else these days, by and large.

 

That's likely true.

But who were their competitors in 1988? The previous ones (Sport, The Sporting News, Inside Sports) were gone or on fumes by then.

There might have been some great investigative reporting going on at some newspaper 2,000 miles away in 1988. But where would you go for easy access to it?

It was a lot easier for the Maple Leafs to make noise in the Original Six than in a crowd of 30.

 

I get where @Woody Long is coming from. Where are those epics by Gary Smith or Frank Deford? In the 70s, when I first started reading it, Kenny Moore had some great stories too. Is there a new Dr. Z? My subscription lasped about 10 years ago and it seemed to think its major competition was ESPN: The Magazine, so half the issue was Scorecard along with some Dan Patrick interview. The only must-reads were Steve Rushin and Rick Reilley. Didn't miss it.

 

Will many people be prompted to buy the issue because of Martha Stewart? If so, how would demographically describe those people?