Ted Gioia generously pulls an article out from behind the paywall for the benefit of cheapskates like me. It’s on the deliberate destruction of Sports Illustrated:
Imagine if sports journalism were like an actual sporting competition — and the best team wins.
In that kind of contest, could any periodical in history surpass this lineup:
- William Faulkner reports on a hockey game.
- Robert Frost covers baseball.
- Carl Sandburg offers golfing tips.
- John Steinbeck contributes a story about fishing.
- Ernest Hemingway writes on bullfighting.
This sounds like an editor’s fantasy. But these are actual stories and bylines from Sports Illustrated.
For a period of fifty years, this magazine set the gold standard for sports journalism. Nobel and Pulitzer winners wrote for them. Sports Illustrated even convinced John F. Kennedy to write a freelance article. In fact, that was one of the first things JFK did after getting elected president.
How do you kill a brand as powerful as Sports Illustrated?
It’s easy, you can do it in one just one move. You just need to embrace the most exciting, futuristic technology of the 21st century.
That’s what Sports Illustrated did. The world’s most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this — they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.
When a journalist from Futurism asked them about this, they quickly deleted everything.
But the damage was already done. The magazine’s reputation was on the mat, like those bloodied boxers it had covered over the decades.
Just 55 days later, Sports Illustrated announced that it was laying off most of its workforce. The media reported that Sports Illustrated would stop operations completely.
A few months later, a new publisher stepped in as savior. But there wasn’t much to save — at least as a journalism business.
The latest move happened yesterday. The new owner laid off 12% of its workforce, including several of the remaining skilled journalists from the pre-AI era. Some of them are in desperate shape.
Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports”.
It’s now a brand name, he insists, with nothing behind it.
That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn.
