Venerable sports magazine Sports Illustrated is suffering a major setback this week after its publisher announced that it was laying off the publication’s entire staff. This comes after a neck-breaking turn toward wokeism and other internal problems over the last few years.
The story was first reported by Front Office Sports which revealed on Friday that Authentic, the licensing group that owns SI, terminated its contract with the magazine’s management, The Arena Group.
Authentic bought the once highly popular sports magazine in 2019 for $110 million from former owners Meredith.
In an email sent to magazine staffers, Arena wrote, “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 has been officially revoked by ABG. As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.”
“Some employees will be terminated immediately,” the statement continued, “and paid in lieu of the applicable notice period under the [the union contract]. Employees with a last working day of today will be contacted by the People team soon. Other employees will be expected to work through the end of the notice period, and will receive additional information shortly.”
Another get woke, go broke. The consistency of that theme is remarkable.
SI used to be our go to for Sports info. We (guys and lesbians) lived for the once a year Swimsuit edition. They managed to ruin that also. How can you fuck up something so simple like that? Who thought we’d want to look at heavyweights or dudes pretending to be girls?
Covering sports is so simple. Stay with the competition. Stay away from the politics and diversity shit, but no, they had to jump head first into that pool. They had to push the ones that were assholes about their non-sports life, shit we didn’t want to hear about
I cancelled my subscription decades ago
Delusions of Adequacy 