Looks as though Sports Illustrated has decided to cut the fat:
No, not that fat. This fat:
The owner of Sports Illustrated has ended the employment of the publication’s entire staff, leaving the very existence of the nearly 70-year-old magazine in doubt.
Then follows a while bunch of publishing industry gobbledegook (good luck trying to understand this nonsense — it reads like the article’s author didn’t understand it either):
The licensing group that owns the sports mag has terminated its agreement with The Arena Group to continue publishing the magazine three weeks after Arena missed a $2.8 million payment, a deficit that breached the magazine’s licensing deal, according to Front Office Sports.
Authentic bought SI out from Meredith in 2019 for $10 million. If it continues publishing, the magazine will turn 70 years old this August.
An email announcing the decision says in part, “We were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI-related properties had been officially revoked by ABG.”
Got all that? There will be a test. Not that it matters, because here’s the crux of it:
“As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.”
Crap magazine, terrible writing, stupid stories, and let’s not forget the idiotic decision to put fatties in the Swimsuit Issue instead of hotties like oh, Leryn Franco. Ergo, from this:
…to this: 
“Oh noes… why did people stop buying our magazine? They must all be Christianist Trumpists!” or some such twaddle.
SI never recovered from the loss of writers like Pete King, Frank DeFord and Rick Telander, to name just some. And the arrival of Internet reportage shot them in the gut, just as what happened to many print magazines in other industries.
Won’t be missed. Mediocrity and crap hardly ever is.
Dunno if you read about this: last November, SI was caught publishing stories generated by AI chatbots – complete with fake author names and headshots. One wonders how many actual staff will be let go – if any.
It’s a story as old as time itself. Try to make money by publishing pictures of scantily clad women, go broke.
That being said, the hefty gal in the blue bikini…I would.
Well, me too. But we are in the distinct minority.
How’s that DEI department working out for you SI ?
In case you missed it, traditional print media died several years ago. Most people are no longer very interested in reading 3 week old news when they can get todays news today on delivered to them at what amounts to no cost. Probably the sudden drop in ad revenue should have been a clue. Is that department where you stashed some of your DEI hires?
When all your writers joined the Union, that should have set off alarm bells as well.
Your business model was doomed with the debut of ESPN Sports Center.
….. and your one issue that outsells all the other issues by a factor of 15, isn’t selling nearly as much ad space as it used to after you added Fat chicks and Chicks with Dix’s to the product line.
Im still stunned that Field and Stream no longer prints a magazine.
JQ
Really! You need something to wipe your butt when you’re out in the field or by the stream.
I was never a regular reader of outdoors or sporting magazines. But one day, I dropped in to my dentist’s office for some work, and he was running late. I picked up a copy of Field & Stream, and remembered they usually had a light-hearted or humorous column in the back.
I started reading Pat McManus’s “My First Deer, And Welcome To It”, and was halfway through when called back.
An hour later, instead of going home, I went back into the waiting room to finish the article. I quite literally lauged out loud.
Years later, I moved to Spokane, Washington, and always thought some day I’d run into him. Never did. He died in 2018.
If I’m reading that article and a few others correctly, Authentic owns the actual Sports Illustrated IP and licensed it out to The Arena Group. Arena Group were the ones actually publishing the magazine, and they failed to make their latest payment to Authentic for the license. So Authentic yanked their license due to said non-payment. That’s why SI may be shutting down, not (alas) because SI went woke and started using AI to write their articles.
Your halfway home.
Why didn’t they pay the License? Because no Money. Revenue from advertising, the primary source of income, had dried up because the magazine is no longer delivering the page views in the needed demographic. Subscriptions are way down as well as news stand sales. Revenue from subscriptions doesn’t even covers the cost of mailing even at the highly reduced 2nd class mailing rates that used to be the primary source of revenue for the Post office. Then they shot themselves in the foot by “fixing” their once yearly cash cow known as the “Valentines Swimsuit soft porn issue”.
So, in a repeat of the lessons not learned from “New Coke” and Bud Light they Fixed something that wasn’t broken and pissed off what remained of their audience.
Ahhh…another brand destroyed by an infamous “investor group”.