Commentary

Sports Illustrated layoffs disgraceful

Sports Illustrated was gutted Thursday, losing up to 40 staffers as its new owners set out to burn the company to the ground before rebuilding it in their image.

Notorious media goons Ross Levinsohn and James Heckman sent the old owners to do the firings, which included MLB writer Jon Tayler, NFL writer Andy Benoit, college football writer Joan Niesen, and writer/podcaster Tim Rohan. Reportedly half of all staff was cut. Editor-in-chief Chris Stone left the magazine on Tuesday before the cuts.

Layoffs, even of this scale, are common in media, and not new territory for Sports Illustrated, which has been bleeding staff for years. Deranged statements from executives are common too. "At the end of the day whoever has been leading this company for the last seven years, in my opinion, they fell behind," Authentic Brands Group CEO Jamie Salter told The Washington Post.

While it's true that SI faced the same financial problems as every other print publication, the iconic magazine had actually gotten significantly better in recent years. Its once-notorious website has been fixed -- something many digital-only outlets can't boast -- and its journalism was in something of a second golden era. Its reporting was arguably the only factor in bringing accountability to Antonio Brown last month, for example. This bloodbath isn't about making SI better; it's about carving out and stealing slim profits.

ABG bought Sports Illustrated from Meredith (which itself had owned SI for only a year), then quickly flipped publishing operations to Maven for $45 million. Maven assumed control of the magazine on Thursday, and the layoffs were its first act as new owners, although Meredith executives technically did the firing. Salter called the overall status of SI "awesome" in the same interview.

The manner of layoffs is much less important than the fact of them. There's no dignified way to tell someone that their health insurance is up at the end of the month and they're locked out of the building immediately. Again, though, these were particularly chaotic. The Wall Street Journal and Deadspin reported late Wednesday and early Thursday that the layoffs were coming in a pair of lunchtime meetings, which were canceled over a legal snag 10 minutes before they were supposed to happen.

While SI employees' lives twisted in the wind -- and that's the key thing to remember here, that these are young people and parents and normal people who need a paycheck -- they banded together and signed a petition asking Meredith to stop the sale. The reason the meetings were canceled in the first place was that the sale hadn't technically been completed.

This sounds like a tragically doomed exercise, akin to asking the teacher to cancel a test. Except for one thing: Levinsohn, the new Sports Illustrated CEO, is such a toxic figure that a rebellion against his control has actually succeeded before. When he was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, NPR reported that he had a long history of sexual harassment and homophobic abuse. Times journalists were able to drive out Levinsohn as publisher, and eventually pushed the paper's owner, the then-Tronc, to sell to a billionaire doctor.

(Tronc, now known as Tribune Publishing, is the same company that owns the New York Daily News.)

Levinsohn's plan for Sports Illustrated is similar to his aborted plan for the Los Angeles Times: fire the expensive journalists and replace them with a lot of cheap contractors.

It's tempting to mourn this as the death blow of a once-beloved property, the final zombie form of a staple of pre-internet sports fans.

The real tragedy here is that Sports Illustrated is doing excellent work right now. There's money to be made in that; SI's new owners would rather go for the safer, smaller payday.

Sports Illustrated might be legendary, but there's nothing more cutting-edge in modern media than getting destroyed by cheap hacks who don't care about the product.

Sports on 10/06/2019

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