Rick Reilly leaves Sports Illustrated - now confirmed by NYT

never thought i'd see the day on sports journalist board where someone is complaing about the nice salary someone gets. if it's about the craft and integrity and not the name recognition or the lights of the TV cameras, then what do you make of gary smith's salary?

you can still care about the craft, have integrity and make six figures. it's not a crime or a personality flaw.

by the way, i didn't see anywhere on this thread where anyone felt entitled to a six-figure salary.

but i like jmacg's salary cap idea. it has promise. a little less for gary smith, a little more for me.

 

Where in the world did anyone suggest we "deserved" 200 grand a year? No one "deserves" any amount of money for what they do. The market dictates what people get paid. Perhaps it should pay teachers more and CEOs less, but that's capitalism. Reilly's strengths and his shortcomings have been well documented in this thread. He worked pretty freaking hard and did a hell of a lot of good journalism to get where he is. (Ever read his story about the high school ref who tried to kill himself after blowing a call in a state title game?) He has plenty of integrity to match his talent. That's the reason why he's recognizable. He's been doing this for 25 years. He didn't just fall out of the sky and get that back page column. I think, instead of being upset or jealous, we should all be proud of the fact that a writer can still earn that kind of money for something connected to journalism. The argument that "it's not brain surgery" is silly. Neither is being a divorce lawyer. Nor the CEO of Halliburton.

Is your life enriched by books? Movies? Television shows? Music? By reading the New York Times? It's important to pay for art, to encourage great writers and great thinkers to help us understand the human condition, whether someone serious like Philip Roth or someone less so like Rick Reilly. Sometimes the market decides we should pay prep writers $28,000. In other instances, it says we should pay Stephen King $5 million as a book advance. There are a lot of people in the middle. I'd like to see Reilly get every nickel he can.

 

Maybe because he's a typewriter, and the rest of the world has moved on to computers.

 

Reilly making $2 million -- is that a good thing or a bad thing for us run-of-the-mill scribes? Might have no trickle-down effect on others' salaries, but I fail to see how it's a bad thing.

 

It might trickle down on the top 1-5 percent. But that'll be about it.

 

The trickle will likely only drip on other ESPN deals, and maybe some top SI deals...ESPN is just unique in terms of how many ways they can use talent. Print, TV, dotcom, radio, more TV. I know of deals there based on hours....they get you for X hours on the air, however they want to use you, and X columns, some for the dotcom, some for the mag...and they'll pay you more if you exceed X. I have no idea of that's how Reilly's deal is structured.

But there aren't too many other entities that can use their people enough ways to justify that level of salary. So I'd be wary of thinking this raises the bar on sportswriting income.

 

I figure the guys (and gals) already doing magazine work and/or some TV stuff might eventually get a bump thanks to Reilly. But the vast majority of writers (99 percent? 99.999 percent?) won't see an extra penny due to this contract.

 

No, you guys are right. We should all make $200k, especially those of us in the booming newspaper business, especially those of us who consider ourselves peers of a guy like Rick Reilly.

I may be old school, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that this Monopoly money is being given to only half of one percent of the people in our business. That means it probably won't trickle down to any of us...ever.

The market (read: ESPN and SI) does not dictate what we make because working at media outlets like those does not equal working at a newspaper that is hanging by its threads financially. (Which is nearly every newspaper these days.) Reilly's salary will not trickle down to the guy working at a newspaper in Nebraska. It will not even mean, necessarily, that writers at a big-time newspaper will get raises, either.

 

I should be making $200,000.

 

So?

 

All of this is fine and true, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your original post, which said that sports writing wasn't brain surgery, then falsely claimed anyone had stated we all "deserved" to make $200,000. You have now run from these original points like George Constanza from a burning building (if I may use Reilly's style of pop culture similes for a moment).

I have absolutely no doubt that Reilly's big pay day will have zero impact on what my employer pays me. I am still happy he got it.

 

Have you even read anyone else's posts here, or are you just waiting for your turn to say the same thing over and over even though you are completely missing the point?