Sports Illustrated just laid off nearly half its staff:
Sports Illustrated cut more than 40 members of its staff on Thursday as part of a restructuring plan. The layoffs were haphazardly executed, with management scheduling meetings Wednesday evening, only to cancel them the next day about 10 minutes before the planned start time. The meetings ended up taking place four hours later, with one scheduled for staffers who were getting laid off and a separate meeting for those who were not, according to a source.
theMaven, which licensed the rights to Sports Illustrated’s print and digital publications in June, is behind the decision as it takes full ownership of the company from Meredith Corporation. Meredith sold the Sports Illustrated brand and intellectual property to marketing company Athletic Brands Group earlier this year but had agreed to manage the media business for up to two years.
Rumors about impending changes and layoffs have loomed over the company ever since theMaven took over. The Seattle-based startup also announced in June that Ross Levinsohn has agreed to serve as CEO of the new company, which will be named Sports Illustrated Media. Levinsohn had a short stint as publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, but was put on unpaid leave in 2018 over “questionable behavior” in his past, which he denied.
theMaven plans to hire about 200 contractors to increase Sports Illustrated’s local sports coverage, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Sports Illustrated has been subjected to some major changes in the last few years. After being sold to Meredith Corporation by Time Inc. in 2018, ABG bought the brand and intellectual property in May for $110 million. Meredith continued to publish the magazine and website.
The unusual structure of that deal suggested that the Sports Illustrated brand is much more valuable than the magazine.
The sniping is amusing. Who cares if the layoffs were “haphazardly executed”. And it’s even more amusing to note the emotional, near-hysterical coverage these steep cuts at an elite journalistic institution are receiving considering the way the news media has generally ignored, when they haven’t openly sneered at, the suffering of blue-collar Americans.
That’s what is so enraging about Thursday’s blood-letting: It didn’t need to happen. Sports Illustrated did not have to be turned into whatever it will now become.
I asked sports journalist Patrick Hruby for his reaction to the news. “I think Sports Illustrated was caught by two different forces,” he said. “The first is the broader shift from print to digital media and the reality that in the digital world, Google and Facebook have gobbled all the advertising money. That money isn’t coming back, so there was going to be contraction to begin with. But it’s the second force we need to pay attention to. It’s the second force that turns a contraction into destruction. That is the fact that prestigious legacy journalism has been hit within the same bullshit industry—private equity—that’s ravaged so much of the journalistic world. Their business model is not ‘let’s manage a contraction.’ Instead, it’s ‘smash and grab.’ They are vampires bleeding these organizations dry and then selling them for parts. This is of course not limited to just journalism. It’s the over-financialization of our economy. What has happened to Sports Illustrated is what has happened to this country.”
The whole deal was financed by a $54 million loan to the vampires from the bigger vampires. This is the inevitable end result of usury; the methodical strip-mining of the economy.