Sporting News sells off last bit of integrity

Yet more confirmation I did the right thing when I let my subscription lapse.

TSN was the first sports magazine I read as a kid. At one point I had about five years of back issues in my closet when I was in grade school. What they've done to this magazine is criminal.

 

I hope TSN's Ricky Bobby column was funnier than USA Today's Slap Maxwell column, back in the day ...

 

Good Lord, that is bad.

Other than DeCourcey on college basketball and Delassandro on the NBA, what makes TSN even worse is they write "at" you like you were some third-grader who needed to be schooled by their amazing knowledge, etc. :

There's one writer in particular (cough ... Matt Hayes) who is nearly impossible to read as a result. And I usually take no delight in wrong per-season predictions by magazines, et al, since I know its a nature of the beast, but I delight when they look like fools, because they go out of their way to shout down at you from on top of a mountain.

Of course if I didn't get TSN on my Dish Network service, I'd never know ANY of this. My subscription lapsed several years ago.

 

Based on your earlier comments - "I don't think the comedy Talladega Nights is worthy of a sports magazine cover," etc. - you certainly didn't show any indication that you thought it was an ad.

 

So what about FUBAR? ;D

 

You know, if selling an ad cover meant I got a raise or got to keep my job, I might not be so much against it.

 

This not the first time Sporting News did this. They did it with some sort of Kasey Kahne NASCAR giveaway earlier this year. It looked like a cover, too, but inside was a baseball or football cover.

Their push to draw in NASCAR fans (or take money, whichever) is frustrating, especially when you only get two pages of baseball notes (one note for each team) in the middle of the season in the former 'Baseball Bible' but 10 pages of NASCAR because they have the ads.

For this Will Ferrell mess, it was disturbing enough having that cover ... and the column ... and the extra's story, but it seemed like every ad had some sort of tie in with that movie, too. Ferrell has sold out completely to promote this movie, most likely because it looks terrible. Thought it might be a funny idea, but even the trailer doesn't make me laugh.

Sporting News always has one or two items -- at least -- per issue that are questionable, but usually it's an advertorial made to look like a story. Or a fantasy column that ends up beeing a push for a fantasy product. Tough to take. My uncle passed his love of SN down to me. As a kid I used to spend hours with each issue looking at all the baseball notes and stats. This Ricky Bobby junk is a new low.

 

You can actually get Sporting News subscriptions for a nickel an issue:

http://www.magazinepricesearch.com/detail/sportingnews.html

I still don't want one.

 

My magazine has the option to do a mock cover wrap, but no one has ever done it.
The cost is incredibly, incredibly expensive.
If the center spread is 10k, just a guess, the wrap is like 30k, plus they have to be regular advertisers and they have to commit to a long-term full-page ad deal.
We'll even do a theme issue, where every ad is from the same company or group of companies, but, again, no one has ever done that. The cost is massive. It is sorta like what Target did with the New Yorker a couple, three months ago.
So I'm not really bothered. I mean, if we don't have revenue, I don't have a job.
I'll let the Poynter idiots and all those more concerned about ethics than a paycheck argue it out, but someone will need to remind them that even the sainted Nelson Poynter was a fan of those ear ads on the front page. The ones that run on either side of the nameplate

 

One of my favorite SI articles is the "profile" on Sam Malone the week of the Cheers finale in 1993.

Cheers scriptwriters were credited as contributors to the article, which was the longest in that issue.

How does that compare to what TSN has done, if at all? Just asking . . .

 

If "Cheers" bought SI's cover....if a Sam Malone feature iin Sam Malone's voice were done by an SI ghost....if Sam Malone and Ricky Bobby rated at the same place on the American pop-culture scale....if Sam Malone's picture appeared 9 times in that issue in ads and editorial content....if SI did a fatuous sidebar about its writer appearing in a Cheers episode and named not only the official Cheers jeans but the jeans company that paid for product placment in the series -- yeah, if all of that were true, then Sporting News and SI did exactly the same thing...

 

Sporting News has been terrible for well over a decade. It's an unreadable mess. And its website is among the worst anywhere.

I'm shocked--SHOCKED--the inexplicably arrogant jerk who always writes me to bash me for bashing TSN hasn't shown up here yet. Shocked.