The end goal, when you really get down to it, is to make money off of nothing.
It’s like alchemy. You wake up in the morning. You breathe in some air. You eat some breakfast. You maybe exercise a bit. Watch some show on Netflix you’ll barely remember in a week’s time. Take a shower. Eat your lunch. Screw around on Twitter for a while, reading but not posting. Check if you have any hits on your Ashley Madison profile. Read the one news article recommended by that guy who recommends news articles. Do some coke. Eat dinner. And then, at the end of your long, arduous day, you check your bank account balance and the number has gone up since yesterday.
You did it! Boy, time to get some rest and get back at it tomorrow.
That was a nice fantasy, wasn’t it? But of course, that’s not how it works in the real world. No, in the real world, what you have to do is buy Sports Illustrated, saddle it with $150 million in debt so that you and all the investors who bought it can give yourselves a nice payout, and then, eventually, kill it when it can’t pay for the interest on the debt. Now THAT’S what I call free money!
And so, on Friday, The Arena Group, which licenses Sports Illustrated through its current owner, Authentic Brands, announced it was laying off everyone who works at SI, some effective immediately, some within 90 days.
Sports Illustrated had been limping along for a while, of course, with some good writers serving to keep the brand strong enough to tempt unwitting rubes into clicking on AI-generated garbage. And while Authentic is making some noise about keeping it alive, the consensus seems to be either that that’s lip service, or that it’ll be a zombie Sports Illustrated, coasting on its name and brand without providing the type of writing or photography that established that name and brand.
This is the current definition of innovation: Find a way to make money off of killing something. The best part is, a large and loud part of the population won’t even blame you for it! They’ll see the magazine go under, remember that it put a trans model and a plus sized model on the cover of the swimsuit issue, and then tell everyone that’s what happened. Sure, there are plenty of people like me (or, you know, like me but with a much bigger audience) who will look at the actual financial details and very easily deduce this was a common American problem in 2024, but there will always be others fighting the culture war.
And to be clear, the culture war benefits Arena and Authentic. It completely takes the blame off of them for not even trying to make journalism work. It lets Time Warner off the hook for the way it spun Time Inc off in 2013, saddling it with $600 million in debt. It lets the system off the hook. It lets capitalism off the hook, man. What if there isn’t even a hook? (Takes a huge hit off the blunt someone just passed me) Whoa. Crazy.
God, it’s great to be rich in America, isn’t it? Because you can make that dream come true. You can make money with almost no effort whatsoever. If you’re a rich guy in media, you do that with a bunch of objectively boring financial shit that no one important will ever criticize you for. If you’re a rich guy in sports, you can do that by simply owning a team, raking in the TV money, and then telling a largely uncritical world that actually you lost money so you’ll have to cut payroll next year.
Except…the world is only largely uncritical. What happens when some enterprising reporter decides to report on you? That sucks! Now fans think you have a bunch of money that you should spend on the team, and sure, that’s true, but you could also spend it on multiple yachts. Really, the entire yacht industry is relying on you here, and these cretinous fans are insisting you spend your money on something so frivolous as sports? Don’t they understand economics?
The solution is simple: simply have a say in what gets reported and what doesn’t. Which is why the NFL is in advanced talks to buy a significant piece of ESPN, bringing the two already cozy organizations closer than ever. What would that mean for reporting? It would mean that ESPN will not break news that reflects poorly on the league. Those investigations into domestic violence and CTE are going to get a whole lot trickier. Real journalism will not disappear from the biggest sports outlet in the country, but there will certainly be less of it, and more hype (and more gambling bullshit, but that’s always a given).
And don’t think that Major League Baseball is immune from this. They were talking with ESPN about something similar last summer, and while it’s doubtful that ESPN will need another partner should the NFL deal go through, you could certainly see MLB and, say, Fox Sports, getting in bed together, which would remove an avenue for real journalism there. There just wouldn’t be that many outlets with the time, resources, and lack of conflicts of interest to do real work on the moral or structural issues facing the league.
So thank goodness for independent print media!
Wait.
Shit.
Sports Illustrated used to have the kind of cachet and resources necessary for long-term reporting. Even if it somehow pulls through these uncertain times in which everyone who works there is getting fired, it’ll emerge on the other side leaner and more efficient, which means fewer stories about minor leaguers getting chewed up and spit out, and more stories about point spreads. And while the New York Times is doing fine right now, if you’ve noticed the state of the Chronicle, well, it keeps getting thinner and thinner. You can do good journalism there, but not as much as you could have a few decades ago.
That’s where the world is moving. Legacy media is being swallowed by the twin threats of falling revenues (why pay for a newspaper when you can get your news for free online?) and rapacious capitalists. Online news sources can replace some of that, but the kind of budget you need to keep one person on one not particularly sexy story for months is generally exorbitant, without any kind of guaranteed return on that investment. Maybe people are interested, maybe not, but are enough people going to be interested enough? Most likely not.
This is where media is going because it is in the interest of every rich person to push media this way. It’s possible there will be a model for online journalism, something like Defector where simply running a good business is enough, without the desperate need for increased profits every quarter (and Defector does great work, of course, but it can’t do everything alone). But even The Athletic sold itself to a bigger fish, so it’s not going to be easy.
There will be stories that someone should have caught that go un-caught for years.There will be people whose lives are ruined when they didn’t have to be, and lies the public believes when they should have been easily debunked footnotes. Everything happening in this landscape has a cost, but hey, at least some dudes are making easy money.