Sports Illustrated Implosion Perfectly Encapsulates The Ugly, Ongoing Collapse Of U.S. Journalism

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.