Legacy media in general is dying. Sports Illustrated lays off its staff.

Sports Illustrated has laid off almost all of, or maybe all of, its staff.

This is just the latest example of publications that a lot of us grew up with (and that even our parents might have grown up with) either collapsing completely or becoming a shadow of their former selves. Many of the major magazines are dead. Newspapers outside of the top nationals are either dead or dying. TV is on its way out as a medium, and while streaming has replaced some of it (just as the web has replaced some of what magazines and newspapers used to deliver) it's not ever going to provide the level of breadth and depth that the old industry did.

Sports Illustrated was already pretty hollowed out, but this still makes me sad. Not just because of nostalgia but because...someone has to do the actual reporting and someone has to pay for it. Maybe for Sports Illustrated it doesn't really matter because it's just sports (though the magazine did break some important sports-related stories of greater consequence) but for newspapers and more general topic magazines it's essential. Social media influencers and commentators mostly just repackage the news that the legacy media sources gather. Almost nobody makes a living being an investigative reporter on social media or streaming (you can argue that someone like Coffezilla would qualify, but he's much more limited in what he can/does cover than traditional investigative reporters) and nobody does the "boring" reporting of local politics and court activities on those platforms, at least professionally.

This stuff is essential to society and it's dying.

I raise this on Giantbomb.com because, of course, we've seen similar events in the video game industry. Almost all of the magazines are dead, and a lot of the websites are dead or seem to be dying. Video game news reporting was never at the level of even Sports Illustrated, but we've seen this year how important old school reporting is to keep people informed about what's actually going on in the industry with labor issues, layoffs, and the like. To their credit sites like Kotaku and some reporters who have moved from those sites to general interest publications have reported on a lot of these issues, but generally not in a deep investigative reporter way, more just reaching out to (or being reached out to by) a few sources.

It's very depressing for me to watch the media slowly erode and be replaced by something much shallower, more insulated, more commercially focused, and less capable of doing the important things that media is supposed to do. In video games and sports it may not be all that important, but it's happening everywhere and that portends very bad things.

Media is such a weird industry. When the internet became a thing I figured we'd have a big change. But I didn't expect big changes every few years after that.

With games, especially, it went from articles to supplementary podcasts to video to streaming to more podcasts... enough to saturate the competitive landscape so everyone can find something that's specifically for them. So it's less about catering to everyone and more about finding your particular audience. Good for smaller outlets, bad for big traditional old ones.

I do miss the age of having definitive sources for stuff. But a lot of people now never really grew up with that. So SI is another legacy brand. I grew up with it, but it's been decades since I got any sports coverage from it. Especially when I can just load up Bleacher Report and scroll through the day's happenings right there.

This is a true shame. I know that SI hasn't really been the paragon of sports journalism that it used to be for some time but it's still sad to see how much it has fallen over the years not to mention journalism as a whole.

Totally agree, but at some point, I believe the pendulum will swing back. While we may not have magazines again, there is a growing mainstream recognition that news, etc. is currently broken. To bring it back to video games, I think there is starting to be a similar sentiment that just streaming is not long-term viable.

I was never a regular reader of SI, but I would occasionally pick one up while waiting in a doctor's office or whatever. I usually started by flipping to the back and reading Rick Reilly's column. For me the most memorable one was Reilly describing some dude sneaking into over 30 straight superbowls.

Anyhow, it really is weird seeing the apparent death of such a storied publication. But outside of those waiting rooms I mentioned--and the tabloids sold at grocery store checkouts--it's difficult to imagine individuals subscribing to any magazine anymore.

I was never big on Sports Illustrated to begin with, but it's never good to hear when a lot of people lose their jobs. And social media has taken over everything, and soon Ai will follow. We are witnessing the slow collapse of modern human society as we know it. But too many people are clout chasing and getting drunk off the 21st Century example of bread and circuses to notice. Many economists predict 2024 is going to be ever more of what happened in 2023. It seems they are right.

This, combined with Condé Nast folding Pitchfork into GQ, thereby stripping one of the last stalwarts of traditional music media coverage, has been a complete bummer. I'm not saying that Pitchfork and SI are perfect, but losing them as resources is gut-wrenching. If this news does not scare you even a little; it is time to wake up. Go out there and find out what your local newspaper is and start subscribing.

Brooks and Capehart on PBS, both journalists that work in traditional media, and I get one of those is NOT GREAT, made the point that traditional media, when applied under the expectations of modern capitalism only survives if it held under a benevolent overlord/billionaire. Likewise, without regulations on ChatGPT and other AI algorithms, the work of actual journalists is bound to be regurgitated, without credit, to people for free with no context of the hard work that went into that information.

I sure hope so. But yeah, I've felt like traditional news and modern media in general has been broken for a while now and it now I'm starting to see a lot of other folks say things with the same sentiment. Social media essentially destroyed modern media and modern business practices ruined whatever was left. Once the internet's current race-to-the-bottom ad market inevitably collapses in on itself (it's already starting to look like it will, especially if LLM-generated ad-filled websites continue to flood the web for the next year or two) we'll hopefully end up in a much healthier place for media where content isn't purely created in hopes of siphoning as many clicks as possible to collect a few more fractions of cents from ads.

Something is going to have to replace what we've lost because news and media organizations are essential to how the modern world works and there are too many people with a lot of money invested in keeping the system at least sort of working to allow it to fully fail. The business models of these new media groups will likely be quite different than what we've seen over the last decade or so since it's become clear that those models never worked in the first place and were built on the various lies social media companies told media organizations that a bunch of gullible business people hooked onto too easily (see a bunch of media companies pivoting to video for Facebook only for it to be revealed that Facebook's video viewership numbers were potentially fabricated and at the very least highly suspect. A lot of folks lost their media jobs because of this).

We're already starting to see a big change in games media with groups like Remap (former Vice. They have a big focus on written content as well as streaming and podcasts), Second Wind Group (the former Escapist people), and a bunch of others. They all work on a hybrid ad-supplemented subscriber model that is designed to be sustainable with modest goals rather than growth at all costs. These types of models are believed to be the future of media and the web. We're already starting to see them showing up in other media spaces too and it seems like they're catching on so there is some hope at least and something to be optimistic about.

@zombiepie: It's important to note that a lot of why capitalism can't support good journalism relates to how private equity operates, and strip mining of companies that are in many cases moderately profitable. This is going on right now with the Baltimore Sun, which was financially sustainable but has been purchased by a company with bad intentions and is going to be turned into a shadow of its former self if not destroyed entirely. That has happened to a lot of newspapers throughout the country, which were doing okay despite the Internet but got purchased, weighed down with debt, and collapsed. This isn't exclusive to papers, of course, the same thing has happened to chains like Sears and Toys 'R' Us, but newspapers are particularly vulnerable because even if the business is okay it's not great.

@ben_h: The problem with this limited scaled back model is that it can't do the expensive reporting that the big media companies used to. It used to be that there were a lot of publications out there doing investigative work and with foreign correspondents. That's fallen off a lot. This is especially important at the local level, where the New York Times isn't going to pay for someone to go do a 3 month report on illegal chemical dumping in some river in Ohio. And we're getting a much narrower look at what's going on overseas from our media (though there social media can help some because there's more direct access to sources who live there.)

Remap and Second Wind may be able to replace Waypoint and The Escapist but there's no similar employee owned company that can replace SI.

The first thing I learned about sports in Sports Illustrated for Kids. Thanks for opening my eyes to the world of sports

Please, note that there is no intention in an argumentative tone here (although written words make that difficult). Merely an observation.

There is a general sentiment on Giant Bomb forums that all evils in the world are tied to capitalism and the free market... I think it is very odd to blame capitalism for supposed death of journalism. If anything, the free market promotes journalism. If you have value to contribute, you will be compensated for that. Look at all the journalists now on Substack in a direct to consumer model. Look at what Jeff/Vinny/Alex/Brad are doing. That is enabled by a free market.

Long before Sports Illustrated's demise, many of their highly regarded sports journalists landed elsewhere. The Athletic has been the new form of Sports Illustrated for a number of years. Brands tend to die out, but not the substance of what was once there.

I believe that ebbs and flows in consumer demand is what is to blame for the current state of journalism, not the free market. People willingly chose to stop paying for their local newspaper and that started the downward trajectory. Our parents/grandparents (depending on your age) had to pay for their news. Post internet, many people assumed they were entitled to the news for free, which subsequently broke the model. Who wants to be a journalist if you are no longer going to get paid by your readers (that's not a private equity matter).

Capitalism and socialism have their pros and cons. Generally, I would argue that the pros of a free market vastly outweigh the cons. Should we have universal healthcare, absolutely. Should we be entitled to our "wants" (not to be confused with our "needs")? Absolutely not.

That's just my two cents. Take it or leave it... the beauty of discourse.

I'm so going to miss that too! I also have an old-school mindset too.

Yeah this is something Patrick has talked about at Remap. They aren't Vice anymore so they don't have the resources to keep a team of lawyers around to protect them and give them advice when doing stories that are likely to piss off some megacorp or make some rich people uncomfortable. It's one of the main flaws of the model and is something they're working on finding a solution to.

@skuski: Nobody here has really said that capitalism per se is the problem, but we do not have a "free market" system (regulations and subsidies distort it seriously) and the "free market" isn't perfect anyway.

When people criticize capitalism they are criticizing capitalism as currently being practiced in the West and some other areas (like Japan) and often specifically the United States. Private Equity looting companies and using leveraged buyouts to extract value while piling on debt and paying themselves has nothing to do with product demand and the simplified idea that if journalism were valuable people would buy it. Likewise a lot of the harm done to journalism from the Web comes from various companies skirting copyright law or using monopoly or outright fraud (Facebook) to control the ad market.

The American economic system is a lot more complicated than "pure" capitalism or supply and demand.

ngl- the pitchfork component of this latest round of layoffs is the one that hits closest to home for me. i have complicated feelings about p4k, but it does kind of feel like a leg is getting kicked out.

there was a good On the Media ep recently if folks are looking for supplemental info.

@bigsocrates

Yep. It's less so that something like SI goes away due to dwindling demand/audiences (which is happening) as it is how things like that happen.

Big fish's pond shrinks. Big fish gets bought by bigger fish. Bigger fish eats big fish and throws away the bones. Rinse, repeat.

I was never a big sports magazine person, but I did grow up watching a lot of ESPN and you can see it coming a mile away.

Please, for the love of humanity, support the written word.

-Signed, A Guy Trying to Live By Writing Words

SI hollowed out by vulture capital until they decided even the necromanced husk was too much trouble to keep upright. ESPN on the verge of replacing its last few remaining journos with 24/7 NFL coverage and gambling punters. The Baltimore Sun acquired from another VC firm by a local rich guy whose first words were basically "I don't give a shit about this paper or you" and records show he's a big donator to Trump and to "Moms For Liberty" among other awful groups. It's pretty fucking bleak all around.

I suppose you could go the Defector/Aftermath route but that only works if you already have a following built up from several years of other works, and willing to spend money on reading what you're writing. There's also The Lever and Ken Klippenstein for more hard news items, but they are tiny operations who can only do so much. Good luck trying to break into writing (fiction or nonfiction) as a newbie, let alone earning enough to not starve from it.

I think a lot of ills the 'business world' would be solved with the United States SEC and US Legislatures passing laws about how profits and how taxes are measured. Just a tweak....

The United States has set up a system where investors can do anything even seriously rotten and evil things like destroying functioning but low profit enterprises. They can fire thousands of people at a whim but let it count as "cost reductions". I think a few simple rules about how profits are counted and the penalties for layoffs for companies above 50 employees would fix many ills of the market. It would be just adjusting the scales ever so slightly so that firing people does not really 'work' as much as it used to. I think with that you woudl find many brick & mortar stores suddenly becoming 'worth saving'. You find many regional stores brands suddenly 'making it work'.

I don't think ist will saving physical media long term, but profitable properties like SI, National Geographics, PC Gamer, Time, People, Rolling Stone, and some other would likely last.