Sporting News sells off last bit of integrity

Baseball Weekly, or whatever the hell it is now, doesn't even do that anymore.

 

TSN once again confirms its complete irrelevancy:



1.) Yeah, that's cool, getting Anna Benson to pose provocatively on your cover. Tough to get that done, since she's so shy and unwhorish. I think the only periodical that hasn't featured her nearly naked is my parents' church bulletin.

2.) The "best" issue. Nobody's ever done that. Shit, didn't TSN do a best issue once in which it declared, shockingly, that its home city St. Louis was the best sporting city in America?

 

Selling the cover is reprehensible. I'm all for people getting paychecks ... but there's another way to assure yourself of a paycheck: Put out a product that people WANT to read. Anything else ... selling the cover, etc. ... is just a short-term boost and only punches another hole in your ticket to the magazine graveyard.

My wife got me a freebie TSN subscription for like two years and I usually glance through it, but that's about it. The other day, she told me she could get another two years for like $2.99, and I said don't worry about it.

 

I'm not sure which is worse, selling the cover or putting Anna Benson out there. Both are symptoms that come with being No. 5 in a three-horse race. They try to compete with SI and ESPN as a national general-interest magaziine. Only they do it with a tiny fraction of the resources. The owner, Paul Allen, has billions of dollars and not a cent of passion for the magazine. They'd be better off recasting themselves as NFL-only, or MLB-only, or Anna Benson-only. Something.

It's been for sale on the open market for 6 months now and there's no word of a possible buyer. I've been a subscriber for a long time, mostly because I subscribe to everything in hopes I'll learn something, but it wouldn't surpriise me if one day it just went away.

 

Editor & Publisher used to sell the cover of their magazine, for what it's worth.

I'd fight to the death if a newspaper tried to do this with its cover, but heck, it's a magazine, and it's a bad one at that. I think The Sporting News now is worse than Sport and Inside Sports 10 years ago, and that's pretty bad!

 

Here's to when The Sporting News was about sports news, long before InTouch weekly and Us and Entertainment Tonight and so forth came along. A decent copy from decades ago is almost a collectors item.

 

The new acquisition candidate is Street & Smith's, which had people at Indy negotiating with Sporting News for a buyout. Don't know how it ended, but they both had hitters in Indy talking deal.

 

Don't the Street & Smith people publish Sports Business Journal, too?....

 

They do.

S&S buying TSN makes sense on its face... until you consider that TSN is 15-20 years past it's sell-by date.

I subscribed through the 80s and largely enjoyed what it did. Read a copy two weeks ago while having my oil changed and the first thought I had was of an actress trying to hang on long past her prime.

 

I still enjoy reading Dave Kindred, but his columns run on the LA Times-Washington Post news service at work.

Sad how far this publication has plummeted. But they're not exactly the Lone Ranger are they ... (Right SI?)

 

I'm guessing Street and Smiths would be interested in the yearbooks side of it - which I think is a profitable part of the business.