RIP SI
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The future of Sports Illustrated looked dire Friday after the publisher of the diminished outlet announced mass layoffs because its license to use the iconic brand’s name in print and digital was revoked.
The Arena Group — which had been roiled by reports that the fabled magazine published AI-generated content — admitted to failing to make a $3.75 million quarterly licensing payment to Authentic Brands Group due this week.
As a result, the publicly-traded Arena announced Thursday it would make a “significant reduction” in its workforce of more than 100 journalists.
SI’s unionized workers received a memo Friday telling them “some employees will be terminated immediately, and paid in lieu of the 60-day applicable notice period under the [union contract].”
“Employees with a last working day of today will be contacted by the People team soon. Other employees will be expected to work through the end of the notice period, and will receive additional information shortly,” according to the memo obtained by The Post.
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Have any of you actually paid for subscription or bought an issue of SI?
I don’t think I have. :man-shrugging: -
Had a subscription years and years ago.
I do still check their fan-written site for Saints news.
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Had a subscription years and years ago.
I do still check their fan-written site for Saints news.
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Ezra Klein talks about to e shrinking news and magazine business:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/opinion/pitchfork-gq-internet-media.html
Sports Illustrated just laid off most of its staff. BuzzFeed News is gone. HuffPost has shrunk. Jezebel was shut down (then partly resurrected). Vice is on life support. Popular Science is done. U.S. News & World Report shuttered its magazine and is basically a college ranking service now. Old Gawker is gone and so too is New Gawker. FiveThirtyEight sold to ABC News and then had its staff and ambitions slashed. Grid News was bought out by The Messenger, which is now reportedly “out of money.” Fusion failed. Vox Media — my former home, where I co-founded Vox.com, and a place I love — is doing much better than most, but has seen huge layoffs over the past few years.
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Nor is it just digital journalism suffering. More than 350 newspapers failed in the first few years of the pandemic. That was the same pace at which newspapers were failing before the pandemic: a rate of two closures or so per week. Alabama’s three largest newspapers have ceased printing. Southern California’s oldest paper went out of business. The McClatchy chain filed for bankruptcy. Storied newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Dallas Morning News have been racked by layoffs, forced to become shadows of what they once were. What’s failing here isn’t a particular editorial strategy. It’s that the middle is collapsing in journalism. -
In the first place, journalism no longer exists.
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@taiwan_girl said in RIP SI:
In the first place, journalism no longer exists.
I agree. In a lot of cases now, it is just posting or writing the most outrageous stuff to get a higher number of "clicks"
Nothing new, just a different version of "if it bleeds it leads". The difference is in the size of the megaphone.
