demise of "s.i." truly saddens me

Get over yourself.

SI isn't something we're all duty-bound to 'solve.' If SI doesn't care enough to ID its columnists and hire copy editors who can recognize common sports names, etc, it deserves the criticism it receives from others in the business who recognize sloppy when they see it.

 

The editor of The New Yorker apparently disagrees:

http://bigthink.com/davidremnick

(If that's really Remnick posting his bio. I can't imagine an editor of any publication taking credit for returning a publication to profitability -- not as long as someone else is selling the ads.)

But whatever. I'm not sure that formula would work for everyone. The people calling the shots for SI obviously don't, and presumably they have some facts/figures/studies that support doing what they've done. We don't have to like it, though.

I don't like what Jim Nelson's done with GQ since he took over the editor's job in 2003. I stopped reading it for a while, but I read it now every month and dislike it less than I did when Nelson first made his changes. And clearly the changes have been beneficial from a business standpoint. (The changes that David Granger made at Esquire in the mid-1990s infuriated me enough that I wrote a letter to the magazine, something I never do.)

Clearly, SI isn't the first magazine to say "fuck you" to a portion of their existing readers when they think it makes good business sense to do that. And then, over months or years, they realize they've either made a good decision or a bad one. In the cases of Esquire and GQ, it's apparent that they realized they had gone a little too far in the shedding-elegance department. Eventually, they met us in the middle and pretty much everyone was happy.

I would expect SI to come to a similar recognition at some point. They really can't out-ESPN ESPN. (Oh ... I see in trying to post this that Playthrough already has this point well-covered.)

 

start by hiring a copyeditor or 12

the errors have become an epidemic

 

1. I'd demand better from the copy editors. This isn't the Podunk Press.
2. I'd hire a certain beat writer from The Washington Post whose name rhymes with Larry and put him in some sort of position of prominence. Same goes for Jeff Passan.
3. I'd kill the scorecard crap and add another Insider column.
4. I'd move Dan Patrick to the back page and leave him there.
5. I'd actually give Lars Anderson some space every once in awhile to actually write something in depth on auto racing.
6. I'd kill the columns altogether and focus on hiring young, talented takeout writers instead. (See above).
7. I'd try to prominently use Peter King whenever possible. Like him or not, everybody knows who he is.

 

Completely agree with this, along with Frank, who said you can't out-ESPN ESPN. The strength of a print format (at least to me) is that you can focus on a single subject or publish a long piece that will hold someone's attention. Don't ruin that space by running a bunch of blurbs and small stories that a person could get by glancing at the headlines on ESPN.com. Likewise, I'd object to the Tom Brady cover story just because that is the sort of "exclusive," non-revealing and hype-soaked story that ESPN would salivate over, like an interview of Terrell Owens by Steven A. Smith.

 

Bring back Norman Chad and turn him loose.

More from Frank Deford.

Give it up on the rotating columnists in back. If you don't have an in-his-prime Reilly on staff, cut your losses and do without. No one in the current rotation does a thing for me except put me to sleep. Selena Roberts is getting her 10 minutes of mega-fame now, but for what? Oh, so she used to work at the NYT? Who outside NY knows that or gives a rat's ass? Tens of millions of sports fans like me never read the NYT. Nothing against NYT, I just don't worship at that altar.

Bring back Steve Rushin. I used to gripe (quietly to myself) reading his stuff thinking how contrived it was, but now that he's gone, I miss it. He could really be creative.

Bring back Dan Jenkins. He doesn't bring the serious heat anymore, but as long as he can go an entire story without introducing some Billy Bob bumpkin character or resort to more tired stories from Goat Hills, he can still be quite entertaining.

Bring back Sally Jenkins, too. She can write about anything.

Next time an SI writer writes and editor allows in print one of those stories in which the writer makes himself part of the story, a la the recent Telander piece on Tony Mandarich, or John Garrity every other week, that writer and editor immediately are asked to seek employment elsewhere. Enough of this.

More investigative pieces that are SI's own work entirely and not another one of those pieces that originate in another publication and which they then hijack and rewrite as their own thing with the smug attitude that "until and unless we publish a story, it has never existed."

An occasional review of a good sports book authored by someone who's not an SI staffer, and there are such things, trust me.

Run their own "Sports Babe" weekly blog-in-print that rotates between the likes of Natalie Gulbis, Paula Creamer, Amanda Beard, Candace Parker, Dara Torres, Maria Sharapova, Jennie Finch, Gail Devers, Shawn Johnson, etc. complete with a new photo each time and let them riff for about 500 words on whatever topic they want, as long as it says something. Not PC? Irrelevant. This is about selling mags and giving it added appeal.

I've lost track of the redesigns over the last 15-20 years. That's not a good sign. Go back and find one that really worked, and quit trying to be something you're not. If that old design doesn't exactly fit the we-have-to-make-it-look-like-an-online-homepage philosophy, so what? Many of us over the age of 25 can live without that, believe me. Unfix what wasn't broke.

 

#3 -- You want to add another Insider column. #6 -- You want to kill the columns altogether. Which is it?

#4 -- Dan Patrick has to show me he can do something other than print transcripts of his radio interviews before I put him on the back page.

#5 -- Auto racing? Really?

I'm with you on the others, though.

 

P.S. And some of you were waiting for me to also suggest bringing Gary Cartwright on board.

Not a chance. Not after the crap he pulled on Kirk Bohls and that other Austin A-S writer.

 

I was referring to the back-page columns.

The Insider columns are usually good reads.

 

1. For all its faults hockey provides, without question, the best photo ops in sports.

2. Appealing to the masses should not supercede covering the best story. Anyone who tells you the Penguins-Capitals conference semi was not the best playoff series (any league) of the last 12 months is out of their mind.

 

Sorry, Mr. McDonell. You're going to have to figure out how to fix your own damn magazine.

 

Also, the inclusion of vault stories in the print edition is a waste of my money. I don't want to read stories already printed in a pricey magazine I already paid for once.