Rick Reilly leaves Sports Illustrated - now confirmed by NYT

I guess Riffs of Reilly didn't satisfy his TV longings.

 

Re: Deadspin's Leitch to SI for Reilly's gig?

playthrough put it up here, with a short discussion following.

A little later on, Jones suggested Price and also brought up Mark Kriegel; either choice would keep this subscriber reading the mag back-to-front.

 

Disquote, datquote... what's da big deal?

 

They were so awful you couldn't double my salary to make me watch them.

 

two times zero is....

 

Re: Deadspin's Leitch to SI for Reilly's gig?

I'm not sure I'm ready to see this guy's mug on the back page of SI.

 

Actually, I hear it was a lot closer to happening than you think. But for the sheer sake of avoiding the mother of all SportsJournalists.com meltdowns, and mother of all TBL gloating sessions, I'm glad it did not happen.

 

Re: Deadspin's Leitch to SI for Reilly's gig?

If the essays Shanoff cites as proof of Will's writing ability are so good -- I'm not doubting, just wondering -- why didn't he provide links so we all could judge for ourselves?

 

ESPN went hard after Smith. If the numbers I heard were true, he turned down quite a bit more money from ESPN to stay at SI.

Still, ESPN thinks that with Reilly on board they can go in for the kill now, driving the last stake into SI sooner rather than later.

There would be an interesting story to write -- maybe even a short book -- about this war and the fortunes of those two magazines.

 

Do the ESPN suits actually think SI can be made to go away?

 

Yes.

 

It's going to turn into a viscous cycle with ESPN stealing SI writers and then SI stealing top newspaper writers.