Sports Illustrated layoffs

he didn't

 

He may not have. But to many that's the appearance. And at this point in history, that's poor judgment at best.

 

It doesn't affect any of us. Neither do layoffs at SI. So please delete this thread. Christ. It's a message board. We discuss all kinds of things that don't affect us. In fact, nearly everything we discuss on here affects nobody discussing it. Is that really the standard you want upheld here?

Since you asked, though, it's not the pay dispute. It's the appearance he creates and the time in which he's creating it. And it's his publicizing of it. If he doesn't go to Twitter with it, I'd have never even heard of the guy. Now I have. And to me, it's a guy who was raking more than 350 large and had it cut to a still very tidy $245k (or more) and then publicly fussed. And, for agreement's sake, his ex-employers are complicit here; without the memo quoting his compensation (it was my understanding that Heckman did not tweet but a memo went public, though that probably was Heckman's intent), I'd never have known any of this. But it did go public and now everybody knows what he was beefing over. And I don't personally know anyone who's ever made six figures in journalism, that I'm aware of. I do, however, personally know hundreds of people who have lost jobs, journalism and otherwise, in the wake of the current crisis. For him to raise a stink about something like this would strike me as curious at many other points in history. And at most other points in history, I'd have been more likely to shrug and say, "Good on him. You go, dude. Get all you can (just don't tweet about it)."

But this point in history? Nearly the entire profession is in peril right now. Good people are losing their jobs by the hundreds, probably thousands. Their pay is going from $0+x to $0. And there are no jobs to get to replace it. Then there are the people losing their businesses and livelihoods, and people dying alone on ventilators, and people being put in mass graves, and kids being left without parents, because of a pandemic that has shut down the country -- much of the world in fact -- causing all sorts of financial distress for literally millions of people. Perhaps now is not the time to whine about having to take a little less, even if it's forever. Especially when your little less is a shit-ton more than nearly anyone else ever gets. To do anything. It. Just. Looks. Bad. And now is definitely not the time, because there is no time, to take to Twitter with your beef with an employer. But if you do that, go ahead and expect to join the ranks making $0.

 

How much Person A makes shouldn't matter. And it doesn't matter to me. Cost of living, time spent making the money, BS you gotta put up with, not all travel is created equal, etc, etc. But I have very particular worldview, too.

I think some people look at Wahl's situation - once Maven chose to reveal it - and probably see it closer to the way Junkie does. What's guy complaining about?

Well, he's commenting on the principle of the thing, and he's right about that principle, and here's something else: People who come from some wealth, or who then have some wealth, generally do care more about principle, and ethics, and the right way to do things. And it has long been the upper-middle-class's advantage over the middle, lower-middle and poor classes; they have enough sense of their propriety to have greater expectations and not compromise and get used at every turn. A person making $40,000 probably doesn't make that tweet, particularly if they're the primary breadwinner in a family.

It just backfired in this case.

 

I always find it interesting how much journalists resent one of their own for making money. It kind of lends credence to this idea that we all suspect this is one big caper, and somehow we're stealing by writing or reporting for a living, that none of us really deserves six figures and we should all be thankful for the jobs we have, and the benevolent bosses who are kind enough to allow us to earn this money.

Do doctors and lawyers feel this way? Perhaps they do. But the insecurity and resentment of journalists always shines brighter when something like this happens. Grant Wahl was paid what he was paid because the company determined this was his value in the industry. The reason why Maven determined that Sports Illustrated was worth $45 million, even if the intention was always to pick the meat from its bones, was because people like Grant Wahl (and not just people like him but literally Grant Wahl, among others) built it into something of value.

Junkie, you're doing an interesting sleight of hand here, taking a known media scumbag like James Heckman at face value, swallowing in good faith that this decision to reduce Wahl's salary was meant to save the jobs of others. I call bullshit on that. In fact, I suspect that is entirely spin, invented after the fact. A company like Maven is not interested in saving anyone's job. James Heckman would LOL at the idea that "we're all in this together." His job is to reduce costs as much as he can, bleed SI dry at a rate faster than readers/viewers will abandon it, and then move on to his next vampire adventure. To believe otherwise is naive.

I would not have tweeted what Wahl did because I have two kids and I'd like them to have a place to sleep at night other than my car. But each person has a choice to make, and I don't begrudge his the way you clearly do because it has no bearing on my life. The Patriots were under no obligation to pay Tom Brady less because his wife makes lots of money, in fact it would be insulting to imply as much, but the principle is the same. Which is why I objected to you bringing his wife into the discussion, a point that isn't relevant at all unless, as addressed in my first few paragraphs, you've been led to believe that certain people deserve lots of money while others don't deserve money, and instead of the market sorting this out, we'll do it based on personal feeling.

I have no doubt -- at all -- that if Wahl believed in what Heckman was doing, if he said "Dude, I have to let go of Sarah Kwak and Jack Dickey and Chris Ballard unless you take a 30 percent pay cut, is there any way we can make this work, I promise I'll make it up to you somehow, though right now I have no idea how" then he'd go along with it. But that's not Grant Wahl's job to figure out those things. Grant Wahl's job is to cover soccer the best way he can, and he was doing that, by all accounts.

I agree with the sentiment that it will be hard for Wahl to get a job that pays what he was getting paid by SI, even with that 30 percent paycut. As Ragu said, the idea that The Athletic is going to recuse anyone right now feels naive to the creeping reality that sports may not be played for a year. So Wahl will get plenty of time to ponder if that tweet was worth it. Personally, if I were Heckman, I would not have been so insecure that I'd have taken this one act as an opportunity to fire one of my best writers, one of the few people who gave my company value at the moment. I'd have talked to Wahl, perhaps disciplined him in some minor way, and tried to get him to buy into helping me save other people by rowing together.

But again, when you realize the goal here isn't to save anyone's job, or even the institution of Sports Illustrated, what happened makes perfect sense.

 

Wahl is probably the biggest writer on soccer in the US. I think some media entity outside of the US wanting to push international soccer here would be wise to hire him and will probably pay him more than SI.

 

Disagree with the gist of your spiel but I'm pretty sure not a single journalist past or present here resents how much he made.

 

I believe you are wildly wrong about that.

 

"Resent" ? I don't think so. Do you resent what he made?

 

Resent is a strong word. Jealous maybe. But there's a wide gulf between jealousy and resentment.

 

Not at all.

I'm not one of the people pretending Wahl said something he didn't so I could side with Heckman and pretend Wahl is a shitty person.

 

Oh of course they do. A ton of people do, and I got plenty of texts from them yesterday as this was going down.