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Notes -
https://nypost.com/2024/01/19/sports/sports-illustrateds-entire-staff-told-they-are-getting-laid-off/
Sports Illustrated is no more.
Now go woke, go broke is a simple and shadenfraude explanation, but I don't think it tells the full story. And with recent full wokeness on the swimsuit edition - well I doubt that it endeared the core audience more. And this year is already full with disney flops and victoria's secret epiphany that people like hot women.
Media in US is in trouble. While I hold the opinion that wokeness hastened their demise, probably it was inevitable. And the US journalistic class has a monoculture problem. There was obviously no one that knew how to run a media property targeted towards red bloodied males. To write films in Disney that are alluring to non CRT degree holding single women.
We are in a money is tight period - and the people that hold the reigns of the biggest media conglomerates have no idea how to sell to huge part of the audience.
I'm not from the US and have never bought a copy of Sports Illustrated; it's only really known outside because the swimsuit issue had reached iconic status. But as yourself and most other posters have indicated, the swimsuit issue and changes around it probably had little to do with the overall success of the magazine. It was apparently a weekly magazine up until 2018, and you have to assume that the other 51 editions every year would need to do well for it to have survived so long.
However, I don't think the failure of the title is an indication of a failure to market towards "red bloodied males", nor do I subscribe to FiveHourMarathon's view below that it represents the shattering of general sports interest. In both cases because there is still a "red blooded", general sports magazine that appears to be quite successful - The Athletic. This just looks like a classic case of a media business failing to really transition to a new business model with the arrival of the internet.
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I'd only ever heard of Sports Illustrated for their "swimsuit issue", and if the magazine relied on sales for their softcore porn version issue, then what market did they have, anyway? People are switching to online sources for everything including news and hobby coverage, if they want fapping material they can get a lot saucier and more in line with their particular tastes online, they can even commission it or get AI to draw it for them nowadays!
So if nobody is reading it for the articles or the possibility of seeing tits, isn't the demise inevitable? I think the "get woke, go broke" issue was a last desperate grasp at relevance, but it didn't help: the kind of people who buy the swimsuit issue for the cleavage and high cut thigh suits aren't interested in trans/fat/DEI issues when it comes to getting off, and the kind of people who write and read this aren't interested in sexist misogynistic mainstream soft porn.
From the link you posted:
I believe there was briefly a period where this group was trying to force themselves to watch football. It was part of some culture war thing I can’t exactly remember. The NFL was doing something annoying, normies stopped watching, and this sunset started trying to signal that they would fill the gaps. This of course failed.
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RIP
I'm going to claim the primacy of lived experience here and say that I know SI better than most of the other commenters here, who seem confused about what exactly it is/was. SI was distinctly not killed by fat girls in the swimsuit issue, at most that was a last gasp effort for a dying icon to regain relevancy. My parents first got me a subscription to SI Kids when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and I think I had a subscription to full-fat SI by the time I was 11, definitely by the time I was 12. My parents have always been magazine people, and magazines have been in overall decline for that entire period. The magazine peaked in the 90s, and has declined pretty straightforwardly since then. What killed SI wasn't wokeness, and it wasn't GloboHomo, it was the internet, and particularly the niche sports blog, along with an overall culture of specialization, the Culture of Refinement (tm LindyMan), an increase in the niche appeal of things and an unwillingness to venture outside of one's niche. In the flood of content on the internet, people sought out only those things that perfectly met their interests, and were uninterested in paging through a news magazine with reports on sports they weren't interested in.
But man, at 12? I read SI cover to cover every week, from the letters to the editor to the off-beat Rick Reilly article on the back page. Sports Illustrated was, for men, considered one of those cultural sacraments, similar to how growing up I imbibed that one was just supposed to listen to Counting Down the Hits with Casey Kasem on the radio so as to know what was going on in pop music. The nature of the activity is that listening to the whole top-40, there would be lots of songs I didn't really like, but I would also discover songs that I did like. I might have to "endure" Can't Fight the Moonlight, but I would hear about this cool new band Linkin Park, and I knew all the lyrics to Uncle Cracker even if it wasn't my favorite song.
Growing up, I was a baseball fan and to a lesser extent a football and basketball fan, but reading SI cover to cover I also would read articles about Hockey and Boxing and Olympic sports and NASCAR. I might zero in on the baseball articles, and especially the ones about the Yankees and Phillies, but I would also read articles about the Penguins and the Avalanche and Jeff Gordon and the Klitschko brothers. My favorite issue came out in the late-winter early-spring every year, but it wasn't the swimsuit issue*, it was the MLB season preview special issue. SI would go through all 30 MLB teams, and go in depth on each team, covering their starting lineup, their depth chart, their great MiLB prospects who might come up and make a difference mid season. I would read every team, but memorize the Yankees and the Phillies. I was aware of every team, but I focused on my favorites.
I stopped subscribing to SI when I went away to college, of course. For the first few years, I would still go out and buy the MLB preview issue, but then I started reading blogs like RiverAveBlues (now defunct), which covered the Yankees specifically, and would go in depth on every aspect of the team. Where before I would only get information about up and coming minor leaguers from SI, now RAB published a list of top-30 Yankees prospects five times a year, and would update with a Down on the Farm feature several times a week. Obviously I couldn't read that level of depth about every team, and certainly not about other sports. I traded being vaguely aware of every MLB team for being extremely focused on one or two MLB teams, knowing the stars across the league to knowing which AA arm in Trenton might develop into a middle innings lefty reliever.
The death of SI reflects that loss of a broad shared mainstream culture, traded in for specificity and niches. SI, and vintage Sportscenter and all the rest, reflected an American male Sports Fan audience, a guy who would watch the NFL, MLB, Boxing, NHL, NBA, College Wrestling, Olympic Snow Sports, whatever was on TV and enjoy it. A concept of the Sports Fan as a universal fan of (male) competition, who also wouldn't mind a bikini issue every February in the dead spot between the Super Bowl and MLB Opening Day. Much more common today is the specific sport fan, the fan of Basketball who doesn't watch Football, or the fan of Baseball who doesn't know anything about Hockey. In the same way that when my parents were growing up, a Pop Music Fan was someone who liked all, or at least most, of the songs on the Top 40, today the idea of someone who enjoys both Olivia Rodrigo and Drake and Cardi B and Luke Combs is just kinda...silly? Even in the 90s one can imagine listening to a whole top 40 straight through (occasionally on long drives with my wife we'll listen to a MixCloud station that does Top 40 from [week, year, country] and laugh at how strange some of the songs are) and it kinda makes sense and is mildly coherent, but after 2010 the lists lose all coherency. Today, Olivia Rodrigo and Luke Combs and Rico Nasty fans are mostly incompatible, they would utterly refuse to listen to each other's music. Similarly you just don't see the generalist American Sports Fan as much, you see extreme football and extreme basketball and extreme MMA fans. We've lost that idea of mainstream American masculinity, the guy who would happily go to a Hockey game or a Baseball game or a Nascar race or look at some tits. Instead we're all hyper specialized, reading blogs and subscribing to Substacks and listening to podcasts about only the one thing we really like. Even the newspaper is something we've lost, a physical newspaper encourages you to page through and notice or skim articles about things you might not have looked into otherwise, in a way that digital consumption does not. SI has been replaced by subreddits, twitter circles, and a dozen specialist websites devoted to specific teams and sports.
My wife is kind of a fancy lady, she gets her hair cut at a particular salon in a small rich town about 45 minutes from us. I'll go with her if she makes the appointment on a day I'm not working too much, and we'll make a cute little day of it in town walking around to shops and coffee and lunch. But obviously when she's getting her haircut for an hour, I need to occupy myself. Last year she had a haircut appointment around when the SI MLB preview issue usually came out, and I had the vague idea that when I was a kid I remembered there being a magazine rack in the back of most grocery stores and CVS's, and I figured hey I'll go buy the MLB preview issue (stores would typically stock it additionally for a whole month, rather than just the current week of SI, I vaguely recalled from when I would hang around Borders as a teen) and take it to the coffee shop and hang out for an hour reading it. I tried six different bookstores/grocery stores/convenience stores, even a place that called itself a "news stand" and NOBODY HAD SI. The magazine racks were stocked with Special Issues of Time and Life devoted to weird niche boomer celebrity stuff. I was so frustrated and disappointed. The idea of the mainstream American Male Sports Fan had declined so far that I couldn't even buy one issue, I had to specifically subscribe to that niche if I wanted it.
Acta est fabula, plaudite
*I recall the swimsuit issue as a major institution, and I remember accepting the first few years that I wouldn't be allowed to get it because my parents would grab it before I got my hands on it, then around 13-14 making extreme efforts to go get the mail every day around when it was coming out so I could slide it into an inside jacket pocket before walking down the driveway, then by 16 my dad just giving it to me in a "don't tell your mother, but we're men together and of course we like tits" kind of way. I still have a few issues floating around somewhere in old boxes.
How does this make sense when you lay the blame for the decline in Sports Illustrated on the Internet?
The internet allowed for niche publications like RiverAveBlues or BleedingGreenNation to achieve circulation that would have been impossible in print. This strangled SI's interest until it became hard to even buy it on a newsstand. I couldn't just pick it up I had to subscribe.
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I feel like the relentless optimization of sports has also contributed to this. Everybody's got media training out the ass, the majority of games have congealed around one or two correct ways to play a given position and exposure to Instagram etc. means that whilst the stars are more accessible than they've ever been there's just not that much of a cult of personality around them.
Or maybe I'm getting old.
Good point. The relentless optimization of sports, and the altering perspective to have more advanced metrics, is precisely the specialization I'm talking about. Old time stats were fairly intuitive: Runs Batted In or Touchdown/Interception ratios or points per game. Modern stats like True Shooting Percentage and Wins Above Replacement require a lot of background knowledge to properly apply in context. It's harder to keep up with multiple sports at that level of fidelity.
I also think that Fantasy and vidya and the book Moneyball, along with tbh a lot of other social changes, have caused a lot of fans to change perspective on sports: fans used to picture themselves as the man in the arena, now they picture themselves as coaches and GMs. More and more, superfans no longer fantasize themselves as the QB leading a game winning drive, they fantasize themselves as the GM building the team. Participation in youth sports and even rec leagues has declined in the major sports {largely as a result of social forces in which middle class athletic kids have fled the classic team-ball sports in favor of weirdo shit}. People less and less picture themselves hitting the game winning three, or coming to bat in the bottom of the ninth. More and more among the extremely online and the upper middle class the fantasy seems to be playing Billy Beane GM in the front office, finding the diamond in the rough players and being smarter than everyone else, or being a coach and building a fascinating scheme that no one can penetrate.
This lends itself to deep and specific knowledge rather than broad and shallow coverage, to deep dive statistical pieces you need to understand 15 advanced concepts to comprehend versus lightweight human interest stories about how X developed The Will To Win.
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Thanks for this. I'll pay back the favor with an X-rated companion piece...
This post means I should write about the dual-episode of finding my Mom's old playboys (it's a non-twist twist part of the story) the same week that a friend introduced me to a guy who used to run strip clubs in the 70s - 90s.
The sophistication of smut is a lost art. To take this metaphor into orbit; Intern porn today is as to 70s - 90s smut as Michael Bay action movies are to Platoon and The Deer Hunter.
I'll set a reminder to write this. Let's get weird.
I'm reminding you to write this, because my wife has sat me through two separate Hugh Hefner/Playboy docuseries in the past week, one pro and one con, and I have an extensive comment to add to your comment on Playboy.
Scheduled for either this evening or tomorrow AM.
Hefner would agree with what I will write
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I'd be very interested in reading this! I read a lot of vintage playboys over the early days of the pandemic, I found them a fascinating artifact.
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This is 100% right; it's the same with soccer in other countries. Add to that that the best media for a given team is usually fan-created, free/crowdfunded, multi-media, and updated daily, and something like Sports Illustrated can't compete. The Athletic tried to combine the two formats by getting the best journalists specialized in popular teams and making it easy to filter for your teams, but my subjective impression is that it's declining in quality or at least putting on a more clickbait front to get signups (they were, relatively recently, bought by our good friends at the NYT).
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Just as an aside, I'm not a sports fan, but I go to pub quizzes regularly in a team that consists of sports fans (pretty useful since pub quizzes regularly contain a lots of sports trivia), and while they're primarily soccer fans and know each other as local team supporters, they also follow other sports like hockey, pesäpallo (Finnish baseball variant), track sports etc. Young guys, 30+.
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When was the last time you bought a magazine?
For me, it was probably the late 90s.
You don't need elaborate culture war theories for why a magazine is going out of business in 2024, you need an elaborate theory for why they didn't go out of business 15 years ago.
Also, re:marketing to 'red bloodied males' with a swimsuit issue... there's just too much access to better alternatives, from porn to anime tiddies and everywhere in between. This was never going to be a sustainable business model.
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I think the demise or susceptibility of media companies to wokeness has been exaggerated. I can only think of a handful of publications over the past decade that have shuttered, in which maybe wokeness or changing tastes could have contributed. NYTs, Vice, Rolling Stone, etc. keep hanging on. Media companies have a few advtanges compared to most businesses: IP scales well and costs can be kept really low. A store has the opposite problem. If Sports Illustrated fails , it would be consistent with the predicted failure rate for businesses overall irrespective of politics or other factors.
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The details in the story are even wilder
Is it just me, or is that kind of not that much money? If you have over 100 full-time employees and the infrastructure to print a news magazine and distribute it nationwide, that ought to be a pretty small part of your budget. You've got to be hurting pretty bad to have to miss something like that.
Oh, and they had already cut back to monthly publication in 2020.
The linked article on publishing AI-generated content under the bylines of fake reporters is really something else.
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Presumably like all other legacy print media they've been fucked by default since the internet was invented. What was even their main value proposition, color photos?
Regarding the Swimsuit Issue specifically, presumably guys used to buy it to jack off to and they don't do that anymore.
That was the business. Oops!
Maybe they thought they could still wring some value out of a lingering perception of their brand among the lame and out-of-touch as having the legacy power to unilaterally proclaim what is sexually desirable, and tried to trade off of that. A formerly empowered authority trying to sell people "YAASSS!" certificates on the old letterhead. I think Playboy and Victoria's Secret both tried something similar. Clearly didn't work.
Instagram and tiktok are free softcore porn for masses. No need to pay for it in magazine form.
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They were a weekly magazine in a world where most of their audience got sports scores the day after the event decades before the internet. I think their core audience was similar to 30 for 30s, they published longer form stories about sports. Their value wasn't news delivery they were far to slow for that, even before the internet broke the rest of legacy media.
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What are you referring to here? I don't really pay attention to sports illustrated or Victoria's secret, so I'm not sure what these events were.
Victoria Secret last year rolled back on trans and fat angels to their previous types of angels
Not really, the stores still have plus size mannequins, lots of fat/ugly/trans etc models and so on. They just added back the original kind of model.
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They put a fat lady on the cover of the swimsuit edition. Then I think a trans "woman". This is referring to SI. I know the fat woman part to be true. The trans assertion is just sort of a thing I sort of think I remember.
It happened.
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It'll be interesting to see if the daily wire's supposed new entertainment channel does well; there's probably demand for it but you have to produce good content.
And I think that's as big a rub as "we hate our audience"- it's possible to make a good, woke story, sure, but there's no set, easy formula so most attempts to do it fail. Rescue-the-princess is a moneymaker because millennia of cultural evolution have figured out how to make it into a good, exciting story, but making a woke version of these standard formulae is pretty much impossible. So they make woke subversions thereof, which end up being terrible stories.
But wait, it gets worse! Creative types don't like to be told what to do, and they don't like being reminded that their job is to make money for the big boss man. Normally the answer is "suck it up buttercup, do you want your paycheck or not?". But I've noticed a pattern with woke organizations; exerting any kind of authority in even the most anodyne and obviously justified contexts(do your damn job, not some kind of side project) is taboo and absolutely horrendous. I'm reminded of Scott's summary of reactionary philosophy, the part where he discusses the hypothetical of getting kidnapped by terrorists, and he can choose whether to be rescued by Mormons or Unitarians. Heck, I think Mormons are obviously a cult believing ludicrous things on the basis of falsified evidence and the choice is obvious to me. Red tribers/conservatives for their faults can actually put their foot down and say "do your job I don't care how it makes you feel". Regular normie democrats seem to be able to say "uh, this is your job". Wokes seem unable to do this.
Now obviously publishing a softcore porn magazine with ugly women was a terrible idea. But absent a willingness to stick to the script(because using only attractive women in pornography is
bla bla unrealistic beauty standardsfatphobic even if there are obvious reasons for it) someone has to answer "who are you to tell me what to put in the magazine?" with "your boss", and I'm just wondering why no one was? Like obviously the eleventy gazillion highers up who had to approve this weren't all drunk on the kool-aid and most of them knew this wasn't a good idea even if they weren't predicting going broke. My best guess is that, since this problem just keeps happening, like communism and famine, that its got to be some sort of inherent feature of ultra-progressive politics.More options
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It's more than that. They don't WANT to sell to that part of the audience. Provided they can keep anyone else from picking it up, they're happy to leave all that dirty money on the table.
The nature hates money on the table. Someone will eventually get them.
I think @The_Nybbler has the right of this one. Are you familiar with the Rural Purge in 1970s television?
All three of the major television networks, but especially CBS, cancelled popular, highly profitable programs for ideological and aesthetic reasons, and their oligarchical grasp on TV programming at the time meant that no one else was able to pick up the money they were leaving on the table.
But content production has much less oligarchical capture, these days.
True in some fields (sports writing, for example), less true in others. What non-woke group has the financial capacity and coordination ability to produce new worthwhile movies and TV shows? Who can compete with Disney, Netflix, or Amazon? No one, not even the Daily Wire, so when those companies choose to produce only woke content, consumers’ options are either consume that material, or consume nothing.*
*That is, nothing new, which doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother most people. If I chose to consume only public domain movies, books, music, etc., it would still take me multiple lifetimes to run out of new material.
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They can guard the table through their control of institutions. Control of advertisers (since the big ad companies and the ad buyers at their customers are all ideologically captured) is a big one.
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