Rick Reilly leaves Sports Illustrated - now confirmed by NYT

Leitch would be an asset on the SI Web site and in an essayist type role. The back page? No. He's just not good enough a writer to pull off that weekly column; not yet, maybe never. Not a knock on him, but that's a really, really tough job. I think they go back to a revolving door of SI writers, and outside folk. That's the best way to keep the quality of the column up.

Leitch's stuff works very well on the NY Times blog he's doing in addition to deadspin. I could see him going there, actually. I wonder is SI is going to let Dave Zirin write in the mag, now that he's on the web site.

 

A few things:

1) Reilly is still the most recognizeable sports columnist in the country. As much respect as we in the media have for some of the newspaper guys out there, rare is the newspaper columnist whose reach extends beyond his or her coverage area. I could ask 10 of my friends who Bill Plaschke is, and all of them would they'd either say, "The guy on Around the Horn" or "I don't know." But if I asked them who Rick Reilly is, nine of them would know, and five of them would have read at least one of his columns in the past month.

2) I'd love to see SI bring back it's "Point After" feature on the back page. It brought a lot of variety, and almost always was a tremendously written, and/or insightful piece.

3) This could be a win/win for both sides. I don't care who you are, doing the same thing for a decade and a half will sand down your edges. The best thing about Reilly was his tremendous range: he could make you laugh one week, cry the next, and pissed off the next. Sometimes, he could do all three in the same story. I suspect Reilly will be re-invigorated by the change of venue, and I suspect SI will find something fresh to replace him.

 

Why does SI need to go outside to find a back-page columnist?

How about Damon Hack or Austin Murphy for that slot?

 

No.
Everybody CAN BE replaced.
Different thing.

 

How about a revolving back page columnist? I get bored reading the same person all the time.

 

Because I don't get moist over a sportswriter answering a blogger's e-mail qualifying as some sort of "scoop"? Please explain, mr. mountain. The whole thing about having "it" first kind of hinges on what "it" is, doesn't it?

 

joe, i'm not talking about the big lead. i don't give a rat's ass about that. from one of your first posts here, you advocated less travel for beat writers, which means giving readers less and sending them elsewhere for the info they want. you disguise it under the idea of "saving jobs." but saving the paper an extra 10 grand by skipping a few road trips is not going to save jobs. it will give the publisher more incentive to skip more trips. and the cuts/laysoffs/early buyouts/etc will continue. goodbye to trips and jobs.

then in a recent post, you give us a lecture about sports being unimportant. i'm tired of that. of course it's not important in the scheme of worldly events. most of us have accepted that. but since it's my livelihood, it's important to me. i don't pretend it's something it's not, but i'm not going to reduce it to unimportant. it's also important to the readers who pick up the sports pages and/or click on your site's sports pages. if we don't think it's important to cover what we cover, then we give readers less reason to read and we give management more reason to take away space.

 

If I was running SI I'd unleash almost everyone in their stable to take a shot at writing the last page every week and run the best one. Not quite a rotation, but not quite a competition either. There is still a lot of talent there, you'd probably end up with a great peice every week, and it wouldn't get stale.

 

Why hasn't anyone brought this up?

The people on this board act like SI didn't exist before 1996. Either that, or they're too stupid to remember.

 

Feel like explaining why? One graf will suffice, Mr. Dickens.

 

OK, I'll buy your phrasing, and change mine to:

Rick Reilly's replaceable.

 

Whitlock pops on after months and months away with that post? Daresay we haven't missed much. Anyhoo, Reilly answered TBL's questions because chances are he had never heard of TBL until he got the e-mail questions, and he thought it'd be cute to play around on the net, give a crumb to what he surely saw as a basement blog. TBL didn't ask about it because it counts on the net being so fluid that everyone has moved on to the next wild rumor du jour