And they have squeezed the lemon until it was dry. In other words, Sports Illustrated is run by not one but two vampiric entities with markedly little interest in the magazine’s erstwhile core mission - you know, the thing that made it so beloved in the first place, doing good sports journalism - and every interest in maximizing profits at every opportunity. It also launched an online SI-branded casino in 2021.) That’s a lot of Sports Illustrated-brand diet pills. (On the licensing side, business is booming - ABG says it has doubled Sports Illustrated’s earnings. “Hundreds of sites dedicated to individual teams - helmed by non-staff writers paid small sums - were created with little oversight and diluted what it meant for ‘Sports Illustrated’ to write something.” Arena has continued to fire editors and staffers, while enforcing weekly quotas of article production. After all, on the publication side of the business, “Arena’s options for generating revenue are somewhat limited, encouraging a daily churn of articles,” as the New York Times reports. ABG then sold a 10-year license to publish Sports Illustrated to our new friends at Arena Group.Īs a result of this arrangement, Sports Illustrated branding is now showing up both on dietary supplements and on thousands of hastily produced blog posts. It repeatedly downsized, switched from a weekly to a monthly publication schedule and was sold by its owner, Time Inc., to a company called Authentic Brands Group, or ABG, which is in the business of inking lucrative licensing deals. Amid economic challenges that confront all print media, the magazine’s revenue and subscriber base declined over the 2010s. Sports Illustrated was already in dire shape long before Arena brought in the AI. So what happened? How did such a celebrated publication get here? The answers point us to one of the most pressing - and unlikely - dangers posed by the ongoing AI boom.įirst, the facts: On Monday, the tech and culture site Futurism published an expose that revealed Sports Illustrated was publishing bizarre and badly written articles attributed to authors that didn’t exist. It’s a stunning fall for one of the great icons of American sports journalism. Today, it’s pumping out third-rate articles by AI-generated writers in a darkening corner of the internet. The evening news would do whole segments about its swimsuit issue. At one point, it boasted 3 million subscribers. Along with, say, People, Time and National Geographic, it has long lined the dentist offices, neighbors’ doormats and coffee tables of your life. But if you’re of a certain age, you know Sports Illustrated. Quick, name five classic American magazines.ĭid you say Sports Illustrated? I did.
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