<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/01/sports-illustrated-threw-lavish-parties-as-it-was-shit-canning-all-its-actual-journalists/>
"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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
