As the Vice collapse and Messenger collapse just got done illustrating in glorious technicolor, the problem with online U.S. journalism isn’t that it’s not inherently profitable. The problem is usually that the worst, least competent, shallowest people imaginable routinely fail upward into positions of management, then treat the media companies they acquire and operate like a disposable napkin.
That’s certainly been the case over at Sports Illustrated, which isn’t so much even a media organization anymore as much as it is a bloated brand corpse being exploited by extraction-centric, visionless failsons, who have minimal coherent interest in the company’s original function: sports journalism.
That’s all well exemplified by this Washington Post article that explores how as the company was falling apart and its journalists and editors were being fired right and left, the folks in charge of the company were throwing lavish Super Bowl parties. It’s well worth a read, and features a lot of doublespeak by managers who talk out of both sides of their mouth about “values” and “mission.”
Over the past six years Sports Illustrated has been tossed around between a rotating crop of dodgy middlemen for whom journalism was an afterthought. SI was acquired in 2018 by what was left of Meredith Publishing as part of the purchase of Time (which founded the magazine in 1954), then had its intellectual property sold to Authentic Brands Group (ABG) for $110 million a year later.
ABG has basically just been renting the Sports Illustrated brand to a company by the name of The Arena Group, which has been mismanaging it for most of that time. The company, like Vice, was run by a lot of non-journalism, affluent, hedge fund brats, simply interested in blindly chasing engagement at impossible scale via seventy-five consecutive but nonsensical attempts to “pivot to video.”
Arena just got bogged down in a massive scandal after it began using fake AI generated authors to create shitty, fake AI-generated journalism — without bothering to even tell staff or readers. Then the company balked on paying its $12 million yearly fee to ABG, resulting in more chaos.
Now Authentic Brands Group is left pondering what to do with the brand. And it will probably involve renting it yet again to some other set of visionless brunchlords keen on chasing engagement at impossible scale in the most superficial way possible. The people who pay the actual price for this incompetence are, as usual, the journalists and editors who have little to do with mismanagement.
When you read the Washington Post article, there seems to be some realization by the executives at ABG, like CEO Jamie Salter, that you can’t just hollow a journalism company out like a pumpkin and parade the corpse around to sell shitty supplements without repercussions:
“Salter insisted SI’s journalism remains central to his mission. “That’s the mouthpiece to the brand,” he explained. “It’s not as critically important from the financial side, but what we put out there from journalism [is the] core. If you took the shoes out of Reebok, I’m not sure Reebok would be Reebok anymore.”
But then these hustlebros will proceed to do exactly that. Repeatedly. Their entire function is to collect brands, exploit and extract any last bit of value, and then when they’ve drained all meaning from the husk, toss it in the trash and start over somewhere else. Salter seems to throw most of the blame for this dysfunction in the lap of The Arena Group, but the dysfunction is commonplace and everywhere in media.
And then the question the Post correctly asks is, why are the actual employees doing the work always left holding the bag, while never getting a cut of the proceeds? Why does this extraction class view labor as such an irrelevant, exploitable resource in the pursuit of their fourth home?
“If Authentic is forging a new way to monetize a media brand — and, to be sure, there are not a lot of happy stories anywhere in media today — why, SI staffers asked, can’t they get a real cut?”
…”As the fates of some 80 staffers hang in the balance and Authentic contemplates its next move, whatever comes next for SI — a new publisher, a zombie website, a cultural renaissance or anything else — Salter probably will be just fine.”
The Sports Illustrated implosion is just such a perfect example of the utterly hollow vision of a lot of the modern media extraction class. There’s really no genuine interest in craft, or journalism, building consistent audience, or longevity. It’s just mindless consolidation, acquisition, quirky tax tricks, and exploitation dressed up as savvy deal-making, all slathered in as much tacky neon paint as possible.
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