Sports Illustrated lays off most of its staff

Well, between us (haha) ... the 5-Hour Energy guy is extremely bitter about losing the SI license, even though it was entirely his own damn fault (I won't rehash all of it but media writers have covered him well the last couple months). As a result, Minute Media seized control of SI before having the infrastructure in place to run the entire show so SI.com now is largely frozen in time from Thursday afternoon, with only a few Big Lead-authored stories being used to refresh the main homepage. The next issue of the magazine is also in limbo. Needless to say this really sucks for the college basketball writers this weekend.

I compare it to like buying a house where you might not take possession for 30 days because you're getting your personal affairs together and you let the previous owners have that period of time to exit -- but then you suspect those old owners could trash the place first so you move to toss them out immediately and take the house even though you're not ready to live in it. Flipping that scenario a bit, I believe the Arena Group could have basically collected rent for a month or two from Minute, operating SI.com as usual and printing a mag or two until Minute got up and running with tech and personnel.

But the 5-Hour guy's ego didn't appear capable of that nor was he letting go easily; he was trying to hold onto SI branding in other areas of Arena and Minute (rightfully) said "no effing way." Then on Thursday night, I believe the guy struck back by shutting down our si.com emails and locking us out of Google docs and other things. I lost some files and am pretty upset. Yet as I sit here right now I'm still an Arena employee. Minute Media has to onboard 100 or so of us -- assuming they take all of us.

Absolutely bizarre time. Front Office Sports has a pretty good history/synopsis of it all, I feel like I should bookmark it and send to friends and family since I'm exhausted every time I try to explain it.

 

Call him whatever you want, just keep including "ex-publisher" with it. He's gonna get smoked in court, the $45 million penalty for breaching the license was clear and his erratic behavior won't help. And I still can't figure out what his vision was for SI in the first place.

We're on to Cincinnati, er, Minute Media.