It’s not officially dead yet, but it might as well be.
https://www.theringer.com/2020/4/11/...hl-fired-maven
https://www.theringer.com/2020/4/11/...hl-fired-maven
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I couldn’t mourn them, for the Swimsuit Edition alone. -
That was keeping it afloat, I guess.
It’s private equity, of course. And as with Deadspin, the people doing it are stupid. They don’t want SI for what it was good at. They just want to slap the brand on all kinds of shit. But the value of the brand has been so diminished in recent years, that I can’t imagine they can squeeze any value out of it.
https://www.thenation.com/article/ar...s-illustrated/Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 13-04-2020, 03:53.Comment
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That’s the PE paradox isn’t it? Buy something successful, fail to understand and nurture the source of its success.Comment
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Deadspin was successful. That was a complete own goal.
SI was in trouble anyway and was probably a lost cause by the time Maven got it, but their plan for its future is especially stupid.
The world doesn’t need any more low-budget sports content farms.
And the kind of people who want that aren’t going to be impressed with the SI brand. They can read the news too and know that it’s been stripped of whatever quality it once had. Besides, nobody under 35 remembers when SI really mattered.
Maven’s contention is that fans want to just read about their teams. That was just as true 40 years ago as it is now. Back then, we read about our favorite team in local papers and team and sport-specific publications and yet SI still managed to get readers by just being good.
I don’t know if the ads could still support it, but it seems like their best hope for surviving, would be to try to be that again by doubling-down on the long-form, high-quality writing about the bigger issues in sports. Instead, their website tried to compete with ESPN.com, but after the demise of CNNSI, they didn’t have that TV presence or connections to the actual leagues.Comment
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Out of curiosity what does the market for sports magazines look like in general?
Just based on what you always hear about newspaper circulation dying off I'm guessing its considered moribund.....
Re. SI I don't think I ever purchased an issue but of course it was something I always read at the dentists office. The best stuff they did was the season previews imo, for example at the start of the college basketball season they would do rankings on the preseason top 25 and then a little blurb on those teams.
I used to get complimentary issues of ESPN the magazine delivered even though I was not and never was a subscriber.... I used to thumb through it and was never that impressed, it was in the recycling within 24 hrs......Comment
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Thinking back on my sports magazine readership.....
Started out with Shoot/Match, then moved onto WSC, World soccer & 442. Had a subscription to the first F1 magazine which was a small publication that was run by one guy in a little office in Bracknell. Also bought a copy of Autosport from time to time. Used to read Rugby World. Remember buying a copy or two of that British NFL magazine which was called (I think) first down. Hoop magazine used to be very good for basketball in the early 90s, high quality, well written but I've looked at it in recent years and its terrible. I've bought the odd copy of SLAM here and there which is better than hoop, I just wish they placed greater emphasis on their historical stuff. Currently we have a subscription to The Ring which I think is decent value, works out at like $4 per issue and it does a decent job of balancing historical info with contemporary. I believe its owned by Oscar De La Hoya.
Would certainly hate to see the industry go down the drain, theres some magic in holding a magazine in your hand, the smell of the print and paper that the internet will never be able to emulate.Comment
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ESPN never really tried to make money on its magazine, as far as I could tell. Not through subscriptions, at least. They gave it away.
As I recall, it was less “stuffy” than SI - more willing to cover soccer and so-called action sports and more interested in young athletes. Grant Wahl aside, a lot of soccer fans refused to read SI because they employed a few oldtimers who openly and proudly hated soccer.
This morning I was reading about how Newsweek still technically exists. It's an awful clickbait farm now that publishes "editorials" by the likes of Newt Gingrich and worse. It also publishes anti-Trump pieces. Really, it just publishes whatever will get hits, whether it's true or not. Time still exists, I guess, though Time, Inc. does not.Comment
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I did not know that.Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
Hating soccer has rapidly fallen out of fashion in the US, anyone expressing contempt for the sport nowadays sounds like an old fart.
Not that I've ever been offended by Americans who hate the sport or felt compelled to defend it its just that over the past 10 years the sport has become so mainstream that I don't even think that it is looked upon as foreign any more.Comment
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It's been a long time since I actually looked at SI, but that's my recollection of it from about 15 years ago. It also used to continue writing game stories that came out up to a week after the game. That was ok in the 80s, but even if they had a fantastic piece, it already felt like old news by then.Originally posted by Cesar Rodriguez View Post
As I suggested, they, along with The Sporting News, etc,or even local newspaper sports pages, may also struggle to compete with outlets that only cover one sport or one team, especially if that sport or team is in anything except football or basketball. That was true even in the 80s and 90s. Even before the internet, I was getting print editions of The Hockey News, Lacrosse, and Blue White Illustrated. And there are loads of other team or sport-specific periodicals that have been around a long time.
But it seems that "long-tail" of niche coverage has become even more important in the last 20 years and younger people just expect to be able to find lots of content on their niche interest rather than having to wade through a bunch of coverage of sports they don't care about to get to the one article that week about the one they do care about.
ESPN.com manages by just flooding every sport with a lot of content (and they also tried those local sites, but I think they gave up on that) and the Athletic is doing that with a subscription model that hopefully works. But SI was never here nor there.
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That's an important point about Twitter allowing you to curate the sports content you want. Even in football journalism in the UK there's very little below the Premier League now. Welsh domestic football barely even features in Welsh newspapers unless you get the hyper local weekly papers. There's no coverage of UK ice hockey. But there are lots of Twitter feeds run by enthusiasts for all this niche stuff. There's just no need to buy any print media. (WSC is the only magazine I subscribe to and that's mainly habit, tbh.)Comment
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There was the short lived Sportsweek magazine in 1986 / 1987, which had some innovative cover shots including this beaut (the last of the four shots included in the second tweet):Originally posted by Cesar Rodriguez
https://twitter.com/MemorabiliaMal/status/1159418619513753600?s=19
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There was a monthly magazine called Total Sport in the early '90s (I think). It only lasted a couple of years. There was a single sport Total Football title too that kept going for longer. Neither was massively in-depth; I remember them as roughly equivalent to Q or Select, the less dense music titles.Comment
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Thanks, Sporting. I may have underestimated the title's longevity but pretty sure that the football stablemate outlasted it.Comment
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I hope print goes away for environmental reasons, but platforms like Kindle which are designed for reading haven't really taken off or advanced as much as I thought they would. What we really want would be a lightweight screen that could be held in our pocket but then unfolded into a big surface - at least 8.5"x11" - that we could read like a magazine without the glare of an iPad or computer screen. It may happen soon.
But insofar as weekly or monthly magazines have a chance - either in print or just online - they need to offer something other than just the basic press-release information that anyone can find on twitter or google. And it has to be something that people will pay for as subscribers or members and/or is subsidized by a charitable organization or rich people.
SI is really sad now. I visited their site. It looks like they've only got about five people writing all of the articles and they're trying to create a bunch of team-specific "communities" but they don't have anyone doing most of the teams. Maybe they will eventually, but there are a few good articles there, like Pat Forde's piece on what is going to happen to college sports if the football season is cancelled, but he seems to be one of the only people they have left. I suspect he will just go to The Athletic.
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SI wasn’t really in the dumps before Maven, in fact its main problem is it wasn’t allowed to pay for itself — it made money but kept getting raided to prop up other magazines in whatever stable it was in before hand. There’s still a lot of Boomers out there who had been subscribing for years, and even hipster douchebag Millennials like me, who had subscriptions as kids or young adults, still would buy a copy.
The timeliness was also not a problem; you always read SI having already known the score. If you hadn’t watched it on TV — and during the magazine’s glory days, it was increasingly likely you had — then your local newspaper would have reported on it. The magic of SI was the mixture of great writing, great photography and great reportage — getting the coach to give a quote two days later on why he ran Halfback Slot 22 Up vs some other play that no one else had and added to people’s understanding.
Niche publications aren’t really doing much better: The Hockey News is a joke now, for example. Being originally baseball only didn’t save Baseball Weekly. Baseball America is still doing OK, but that’s basically a trade publication.Comment
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I thought the website had been going downhill for a while and I stopped reading it in print a while ago after they charged me to resubscribe even though I never asked to subscribe to begin with. But that was like ten years ago. I also didn't like their takes on some specific issues, but that's neither here nor there.
I don't know if it could remain economically viable as a weekly unless it was bought by somebody who was ok with it not making much. Like you said, it was making money, but Google and Facebook are sucking up all the ad dollars.
I admit I haven't looked at The Hockey News much in a while. I subscribed in the 90s because back then it was really hard to get much hockey coverage in the US. It's a lot easier now, although not as easy as it was in the days when you could read all the Canadian newspapers online for free. There is still not much coverage of college hockey outside of campus newspapers. Even the Boston and Minneapolis papers don't cover it very well and there are basically just two college hockey-focused websites and neither has more than a few reporters..
Baseball America is literally too "inside baseball" for me to pay for. I'm not that interested in high school prospects, etc. and there are a surprising number of amateur blogs that do a pretty good job of covering the farm system for each team.
I hope Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs can survive this. I think they're struggling right now without any games or fantasy competitions. I think they can make it eventually, but it will be hard now.
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