Sports Illustrated Implosion Perfectly Encapsulates The Ugly, Ongoing Collapse Of U.S. Journalism
from the hollowed-out-and-sold-for-parts dept
When we last checked in with what’s left of Sports Illustrated, its owner, The Arena Group, had just got done baring its ass as part of a giant ‘AI’ related scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a great idea to create a bunch of fake, AI-generated writers to shit out lazy, uninteresting clickbait, without really telling any of the folks that create actual journalism at the company.
When busted, Arena Group executives blamed everyone but themselves.
Sports Illustrated’s fortunes got even bleaker last week, when it was revealed that The Arena Group, which had actually only been renting the Sports Illustrated brand as part of a 10-year deal with Authentic Brands Group (ABG), had failed to make a quarterly $3.75 million payment to continue licensing it. That resulted in a revocation of the branding license and no limit of additional chaos for the already imploding company.
To hear ABG CEO Jamie Salter tell it, Arena Group tried to change the terms of the licensing deal and lower its payments mid-stride. Salter says they may still be able to strike a deal with Arena, or they may find another renter. But when it comes to sports reporting and Sports Illustrated, it doesn’t really matter at this point — as the brand has already largely become a zombie of its former self.
And, as is usually the case, employees doing the actual work were the ones who got to pay the price for their employers’ incompetence and bickering, with large swaths informed of layoffs:
“Earlier today, The Arena Group gave notice over email that it would be conducting layoffs at Sports Illustrated. A statement from the Sports Illustrated union revealed that “a significant number, possibly all” of the magazine’s staff would be losing their jobs as the result of Authentic Brands Group’s decision to revoke The Arena Group’s license to the SI brand.”
Over the past six years Sports Illustrated has been tossed around between a rotating crop of dodgy international middlemen for whom journalism was an afterthought. SI was acquired in 2018 by what was left of Meredith Publishing as part of a purchase of what was left of Time, Inc. (which founded the magazine in 1954), then had its intellectual property sold to Authentic for $110 million a year later.
All the while, the output and quality of the end product and brand steadily declined, resulting in a media outlet that’s now more interested in hawking supplements and affixing its brand to casino deals than doing any sort of cogent sports reporting. It’s a not dissimilar trajectory to other major media brands like Newsweek, which was hollowed out like a pumpkin and now traffics in right wing conspiracy theories.
Sports Illustrated’s decline runs in parallel to the ongoing, continuing collapse of real journalism and the whole accurately informing the public thing–which has never been much of a money maker. There were a record number of media layoffs last year, as trust fund brunchlords and the incompetent stewards of a dying press hustle and jockey to make a quick buck shuffling bloated brand corpses around.
It’s more profitable to make a quick buck striking acquisition deals and pointless mergers for the tax breaks — generating automated clickbait and bullshit at historic scale and using what’s left of popular brands to sell junk — than it is to pay real reporters a living wage to create quality journalism. The end result of that lazy mindset is everywhere you look. And it seems to be getting worse.
Despite a lot of lip service, we’ve never really spent a whole lot of time actually trying to find creative new funding options for real journalism at any meaningful scale. Certainly nowhere near the time and effort put into get rich quick tech fads like NFTs. The stewards of what’s left have no interest in real journalism, or funding it. They’re in it to make a quick buck off the fading remnants of a dying industry, cutting corners, firing employees, and pursuing easy money wherever possible.
As a result journalism — sports or otherwise — is steadily being replaced by a parade of automated gibberish, clickbait, well-funded propaganda, and marketing, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find anybody with the ethics and resources interested in reversing — or even combating — the trajectory.
Filed Under: branding, journalism, media, reporting, sports illustrated, trademark
Companies: arena group, authentic brands, authentic brands group
Comments on “Sports Illustrated Implosion Perfectly Encapsulates The Ugly, Ongoing Collapse Of U.S. Journalism”
Leasing a brand for over a million bucks a month seems like possibly one of the dumbest business moves possible.
Instead of using AI to replace what are ostensibly “front line” employees, I suggest using AI to replace the C-suite execs. An LLM trained exclusively on posts from 4chan and The Art of the Deal could probably do a better job of running a company than those overpaid assholes.
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I think in a lot of cases a brain-dead rat could do a better job…
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You mean it’s possible to tell the difference? 🙂
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Sure. A brain-dead rat will do absolutely nothing. Just letting the situation “coast”. Some/many “C-Suite assholes” will actively work to achieve optimal terribleness (by all metrics)
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Give them better training material and they might even be competent!
Whereas the likes of Musk seem to have infinite free time compared to their employees yet supposedly run several companies – and make more money even if they collapse the companies!
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Didnt Take The Bait
As usual, if you get woke then you go broke. Between trans athletes, fat chicks in bathing suits, and a lot of race baiting, Sports Illustrated had all of the virtue signals that should have generated a massive SJW following. It still didn’t work.
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The problems with Sports Illustrated run much deeper than your surface-level grievances with the existence of marginalized people.
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Well, yeah. We can go deeper. The problems with journalism are manyfold (AI, barrier to entry, declining viewership, adblock, clickbait), but something that’s more the fault of the leftwing is that specifically progressive journalists don’t see themselves as (or even want to be!) impartial reporters anymore–they must promote a certain ideology, damn the consequences. They must lie, mislead, and misinterpret, removing any people who would otherwise put voice to inconvenient truth. When it gets caught, it reduces the trust the public has for “journalism” in general; this trust is also something that’s dooming newspapers. It’s lowered among all sides of the political spectrum. You have to acknowledge that.
I won’t even go for a super controversial example. Remember the Tom Cotton NYT op-ed? He was a sitting senator, yet the journalists there revolted after seeing the editors had published that. The editors apologized, then James Bennet had to resign, and so on. People acted as though they were platforming a fascist, when he was complaining about the anarchy in cities. You might disagree with him, but those aren’t particularly inciteful words.
Next example. Covington controversy. Initial reporting implied repeatedly that a group of catholic teenagers were viciously harassing a Native American man, especially that damn kid smiling. The school gets a few death threats. Then, oops, the full video comes out and it turns out nothing of the sort happened. The journalists who got it wrong weren’t sheepishly apologizing, many of them pretended like they’d never been baying for his blood in the first place.
“A Rape On Campus”, probably one of the very first examples where activism trumped investigation. Fake incident, fake attacker. Similar things happened where the frat where it “allegedly” happened was attacked, attempts were made to revoke their status, then the story fell apart and the magazine that got egg all over their face got raked over the coals for it; although it didn’t take away from the harassment experienced by the frat or the university president.
OK, let’s think up a left wing example now, since you’re probably a bit steamed about me bringing up only right wing examples. Most of them come from the current Palestine/Israel conflict. Let’s go with the 40 beheaded babies claim. Very barbaric, horrific, a sign of Hamas savagery. But no, that wasn’t true. Although babies were killed, there were never 40 of them, and they weren’t explicitly beheaded. Still used to push the idea that Hamas fighters are savage, inhuman barbarians until the correction.
As long as trust in the media remains low, “media” in general will continue its downward spiral. It doesn’t really matter how much you sneer at the people you think are “complaining about marginalized people” in the comments.
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old man complains about people who are different from him, more at 7 tonight
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And also until 7. And then on until bedtime. Then it starts again tomorrow morning after poop time.
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Bro just pulled out the deep cuts 🤣
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Bemoans the anti-social, injustice coward.
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Tell me you didn’t read Sports Illustrated wiyhout telling me you’ve never read Sports Illustrated.
Yah, bruh, no other magazines have failed at all recently. Just them woke ones. Totally.
It was either continuing on as a shell of its former self, with underpaid journalists trying to write articles in hopes that ESPN would notice them or firing off all of its workers so that Bots could write highly informative articles about how tricky volleyball can be without an actual ball to practice with.
It’s sad but at least there will be more close encounters of the athletic kind between [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] and [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] and AI will help cover those stories, avoiding the brakes and shifting into victory gear.
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If only ESPN had gotten a chance to learn of SI existence.
Excsue me, SI was never journalism.
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You do know that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was a special edition published once a year? Every other issue did have articles written by journalists even if you didn’t know those issues existed or just watched the pictures.
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“just watched the pictures” Apaprently you discern o called journalists from blantant paid propaganda.
Glad its gone.
Rocky? As in rocks in the head?
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You got angry 😊😊😊
I doubt you will learn from this experience though.
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Learn what actually rocky-head? Hey, go watch the pictures rocky-head.
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Can we get a poopy-head insult too? Please? 😏
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This post is embarassing for everyone.
Countdown to Mike sneering about AI doomers or greedy media companies wanting money for nothing in 5… 4…
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I’m not sure what you’re intending with this. Do you mean Sports Illustrated or US journalism would have skyrocketed towards higher standards had AI not existed? Or do you intend to suggest that news corporations wouldn’t have continued to demand money in exchange for nothing had AI not existed?