For some reason, lefty sports fans have taken to blaming the demise of Sports Illustrated on greed run amok. And sure, owners of companies tend to be greedy. But SI's circulation peaked 30 years ago and has been declining ever since. In 2018 it went biweekly and in 2020 it went monthly. Total annual circulation has fallen off a cliff:
The reason is hardly a mystery. When SI started up, it was one of the few sources of real sports reporting. TV broadcast a smallish number of sports events and that was that.
But then came ESPN and then the web, which combined to saturate the public with sports and sports commentary. There wasn't a whole lot of room left for week-old reporting that was stale by the time it landed in your mailbox.
And of course that's all against a backdrop of general interest magazines dying off. Life and Look died long ago. Newsweek is dead. TV Guide is still around, but it's a shadow of itself. Reader's Digest filed for bankruptcy twice and is now mostly online. Playboy died four years ago. National Geographic's circulation has dropped by 85% and was recently pulled off newsstands. Time magazine is still around but its readership is down 70% from its peak.
So that's that. Magazines are in trouble generally and the sports commentary market is wildly oversaturated. There's not much more to it than that.
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I think there were two eras of collapse. The general interest magazines like Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post were gone by the 1970s. I think you can blame television for this. When Life came out, the big selling point was that it was pictorial, but television one upped that with video.
Magazines like Time and Newsweek fell apart in the 1980s. I'm inclined to blame cable news which satisfied the news junkies. Sports Illustrated began its decline around then as well. There were cable sports programs. You didn't need league backing to talk about sports.
Surviving magazines have gotten increasingly niche. Sky and Telescope hangs on with people bitten by the astronomy bug. Flying serves those with "avgas in their blood". Consumer Reports is for concerned consumers. Meanwhile, the New York Times seems to be splitting its newspaper business into a primary news portal and a series of what are essentially online magazines, Wirecutter for shopping, The Athletic for Sports, their puzzle magazine, and we'll soon see others and other newspapers following this trend.
I think you're correct about the NYT. Also, I'm addicted to four of the puzzles. I still can't be bothered with the crossword.
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I must admit I called it wrong when it comes to the future of print periodicals. It was obvious twenty years ago that the newspaper/magazine business wouldn't survive intact. But I though many individual publications might be able to survive in print form by aggressively going upmarket and trying to fill a "luxury goods" niche. Affluent households in fancy neighborhoods, I reckoned, would still like to have glossy magazines on their coffee tables. They look good, after all, and surely there's a certain tactile pleasure in being able to browse through an attractively laid out magazine. (Obviously such a business model would entail much lower subscriber numbers, but that could be made up for with better demographics). I thought even many newspapers might be able to pursue such a vision: go "online only" on a daily basis, but produce a weekly or bi-weekly glossy newsmagazine targeting your best customers.
Anyway, this mostly hasn't played out, to say the least. Most publications seem to be barely surviving even as online properties, never mind as print vehicles.
SI absolutely produced some great writing back in the day.
Music mags like Mojo, Uncut, BBC Music seem to be doing OK. Even super niche like Acoustic Guitar.
Look at the magazine racks in Barnes and Noble and you see this - lots of very niche publications on hobbies, history (mostly war), travel and lifestyle, etc. and not a whole lot else.
Dam. All my favorite magazines are either dying or becoming a bit weird as they chase an ever narrowing niche while employing fewer good writers. Now excuse me while I get those dam kids off my lawn.
Ehh, it's more than that. For the most part, a sports fan can get away with access to granular information of sports teams and players for the unbeatable, low rate of: Free. (Collection of personal data aside.)
Generally, magazines are in steep decline because: Free information. Sure, sites put stuff behind a paywall to grab subscriptions from willing readers, but much of the information these sites are pushing out is being reported elsewhere for free. Cool house on Dwell? It's also being written about on a half-dozen design/architectural sites. New discovery reported in Popular Science? It's also being reported on a hundred other science sites for free.
Technically, this is the microeconomic effect of substitution. But no one really gives two shits about micro.
The internet has made it possible to realtime-argue about sports with anyone in the world till you drop (which is what we really wanted all along), instead of just reading what a few shopworn retired jocks think about it once a month. Total paradigm change.
“…reading what a few shopworn retired jocks think about it” was not what SI was about when Time-Life started it. I was a subscriber from day1, and even at the age of eleven I could recognize writing talent when I read it. Walter Bingham, Dan Jenkins, and a few years later Frank Deford are a sampling of the names I remember from 60 years ago. They set a standard of excellence in writing that’s sadly missing nowadays.
The loss of national magazines is sad, but the loss of local newspapers suffer is worse.
Investigative reporting is falling off, and is devolving into dumps of oppo research.
There is also this
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/sports-illustrated-found-publishing-ai-generated-stories-photos-and-authors
This was just flailing around in the wake of SI having already died.
When I was a young pup, my dad would get SI. In that era, it had serious articles about sports skills. Here's lengthy piece about hitting based on discussions with Ted Williams with lots of great line drawings. Another week it might be about pitching (was it Bob Feller?). Maybe Williams got another piece about fishing. This was serious stuff. Other good writers of that time were Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright.
SI was also competing with the monthly Sport magazine which was more a feature magazine and the Sporting News. The focus in all these publications at that time was baseball, the purported national game.
Times changed. Games changed.
By way of comparison, back in the early 2000s I got a short prescription was a bonus for signing up for something else--I don't recall what. I had not given the magazine any thought in years, but was willing to take a look. I found it largely insubstantial. Yes, it had some good photography. But as a source of information, I was not impressed. I ignored the inevitable barrage of junk mail trying to get me to renew.
I forgot about Blackie Sherrod one of the greats.
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In Richard Snow's excellent account of the Somers mutiny, "Sailing the Graveyard Sea", he mentions a previous treatment of the story written by a writer in the 30's, who made a profitable living writing for the 'slicks'--glossy magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, glossy (slick) magazines which printed fiction and non-fiction. Writers like Vonnegut and Salinger got their first exposure in them. P.G. Wodehouse said he was never sure of a story until it was accepted by the Post's George Lorimer.
I can remember the last years of the Post, and I pick up old copies at rummages and thrifts.
Some of you will be saying that about print magazines in general.
SI started going downhill when they went all DEI with the Swimsuit issues.
Yeah, I said it. Sue me!
BTW, I never knew Playboy was categorized as a "general interest" magazine. Obviously influenced by those who subscribed to it for the articles.
also, 10 year old boys and their fathers dont need the swimsuit issues anymore, its on the interweb
Thanks for writing this. I had read a similar post online at New York Mag talking about greed killing Sports Illustrated but didn't go much detail because, quite frankly there wasn't much to say. You laid out perfectly why SI has apparently died and why basically it became a literal football for those owning or trying to own it.
I still believe the SI brad has value and that a bi-weekly journal of long-form sports journalism would still be viable even in print. Of course whoever owned it would have to be prepared to lose quite a bit of money but considering the way billionares like to burn their money on political consultants, I think it far more worthy investment for one's legacy and just good journalism in general.
Something Matt Yglesias posted online recently also should be pointed out. Once upon a time you could only sell hard liquor in magazines like SI. That was a nice source of revenue from some fairly deep pockets. Not anymore.
"When SI started up, it was one of the few sources of real sports reporting."
??? This is a bizarre claim. Back in the day, daily newspapers had huge sports sections and there were weekly publications devoted to the topic. SI's gimmick was the 'Illustrated' part. This wasn't a new idea, but SI did it very well.