Time marches on/the end is near

 

I didn't post yesterday, mostly because I was gathering my thoughts (and pictures and scans) on what I was going to say about the latest step in Sports Illustrated's demise.

The news yesterday was so stunning that I almost couldn't believe it and didn't want to write anything about it for fear it was all internet hysteria and we could go back to pretending that print journalism was still on a ventilator and not one final shovel of dirt away from burial.

But it doesn't appear to be good news in any event. The patient is dying. The end is near.

 

This past week was terrible for traditional sports journalism. The Sporting News laid off folks, including Ryan Fagan, who I've mentioned a few times on this blog and was basically the face of TSN for me. Then the news about SI laying off virtually everyone appeared. I knew the faces of a couple of the writers who are losing their jobs there, too, thanks to social media. This is crushing. And this type of stuff is a regular occurrence in the print journalism industry.

 

I deal with it in my job. I've experienced layoffs twice in the last year and I know they'll probably show up again. Newspapers all over the country are closing their doors and have been with greater frequency the last five years or so. Here's an uplifting graphic I saw yesterday:

 

That's awful. I'm not going to explain why, you should be able to realize it without much thought, but too many people dismiss the decline of newspapers with too-common excuses like "there's nothing in my paper anyway/it keeps going up in price." Or they've been brainwashed by the usual suspects and think that this is actually good news.

 

But I want to focus on SI ... and, yes, eventually on cards.

 

The most disturbing element of the Sports Illustrated bomb, other than the horrible mismanagement of an iconic brand and the dismissal of so many talented people, is how few folks seem to care. I put out a couple of mourning thoughts on other social media yesterday and received little reaction. I don't know if SI is considered so archaic to people these days that they can't relate to it or if this is one of those "dad things" that the internet is supposed to hate. But it makes me feel like I need to say that Sports Illustrated at one point -- not so long ago -- was like Coca-Cola or McDonald's (or to be more current, Nike or Amazon). It was that iconic.

 

I subscribed to SI at least three different times in my life, when I was a kid, during my formative journalism days from the late '80s into the '90s and for a short period around 2000-06 when I felt like I needed to support the brand.

 

Sports Illustrated was appointment reading. Every Thursday it would show up and I looked forward to it. I didn't read every article, but I read a lot and I learned a lot. I got to know the writers and who I liked best and who I looked forward to most. Writing for SI was my dream job for a long time (and maybe I'm lucky I didn't get to work there or I might not have a job now, but I would get to say, "I wrote for SI").

 

I've mentioned this before but in high school when I had a free period, I'd go to the library, head back to the magazine section and grab the latest SI to read. I kept all the SIs that came to my house and I can remember many of the covers, especially the ones from the late '70s but also many later ones. I remember the LeBron James "The Chosen One" coming to my house (I didn't know who he was), I remember the Michael Jordan hologram cover.

Eventually I had to downsize and disposed of most of my SI's but not before tearing out my very favorite articles to keep and re-read. I kept those for a long, long time as well before disposing of all but dozen or so.

I still have some Sports Illustrated issues that people have sent me, mostly Dodgers stuff. I also have all the first "Where Are They Now" issues that SI put out from 2000-08. I've also kept several of the old swimsuit issues.

I loved when SI put out special sections. The Year-End issue, obviously. The Sportsman of the Year. And then there was that one time when it issued all of its covers in one shot.

I kept those pages, too.

 

Sports Illustrated was such a pervasive aspect of my growing up that it shaped what I wanted to do in life. Before "narrative" became a way to undermine journalists, I adored the long-form features that appeared in SI. The writing of people like William Nack, Mark Kram, Gary Smith, Leigh Montville and others was so picturesque and captivating and so beyond anything I could do. But I wanted to do it. Somehow.

 

As I found a job in sports journalism and tried to get better and better, I discovered a book called "The Best American Sports Writing" in 1993. It was a compilation of individual articles written during the past year. Fascinating stuff. And a lot of it was from Sports Illustrated writers.

I became obsessed and bought it every year for several years. I think this franchise is still going but I'm not sure how to get the most recent editions -- I've gotten lazy in the internet era. 

There they all are on my bookshelf (still need to finish reading the mammoth century one).

One key aspect of Sports Illustrated is that it was a franchise that you could trust. You could depend on the writers to find interesting stories and inform you with words that took you on a journey, that could produce laughter or tears. There was an art to telling the complete story. You didn't have to search out any other quality sportswriting, it was there in SI every week. You could count on it to be creative, too. Sports was supposed to be fun as well and whimsy was one of SI's strong points.

SI deserves some -- maybe a lot -- of the blame for its demise, and it's been tough for traditional magazines to transition to digital. But the sad part to me is few people now want, or don't have the patience, or don't have the mental stamina or whatever to sit and read an SI article. In the time since I wished I could do what SI writers do, I've gotten pretty good at long-form stories, picked up a few awards from newspaper articles I've written, landed a magazine gig of my own, and write long-ass-stuff-that-nobody-today-has-time-to-read on this very blog. But not only has time changed, but people have changed. I think their brains have changed. I feel like what I've always loved and aspired to is no longer relevant.

I know that some people still appreciate it. It's just not enough people to breath life into a gasping franchise.

Oh, right, books, I've got SI books, too:

Anyway, I know that time marches on. I don't think things will get better as far as print sports journalism goes or, really journalism in general (I could make this rant even longer by recounting what I see on the sports wire every day now -- it ain't good). It will just get steadily and dismally worse until the only thing left is people writing about which teams to gamble on -- and when I see people who used to be journalists talking about nothing but point spreads and parlays I lose all hope.

I think Sports Illustrated is/was the pinnacle. I don't think anything that has come along since can touch it. I know there's The Athletic, but it has its own problems, and finding what SI produced and being able to rely on it year in and year out is almost impossible on the internet.

There's not a lot I can do about that except ramble about it here. But I think I will try to gather even more of those Sports Illustrated Covers cards that Fleer made in the late 1990s as my little tribute.

They still gave SI proper credit in the 1990s. These two cards are from the 1997 Fleer SI Covers inserts. Briefly touching on the topic of the demise of physical media, I sometimes think about how baseball cards are super old-school and traditional but while magazines and newspapers have declined, cards continue to thrive. Maybe because they're looked at more these days as pretty pictures/designs (and investments) rather than pieces of information. Or it's that attention-span thing again.

Here are the two Dodger-themed ones from 1998 (I think I have all the Dodgers, I'll have to double-check this).

But I have the most from 1999 after I announced a little while ago that I wanted to gather all of the cards that showed covers from when SI came to my house the first time back in 1976-77.

 

This is also from the 1999 SI Covers set and that issue definitely did not come to my house. In researching this post and digging out the SI articles I had, I found something I never knew.

 

SI was always telling me about something I didn't know.

I do what I can here to bring the spirit of magazines onto the blog. It's not the same but it's the closest I can get. Writing is in my blood and that desire to inform in a creative way that is more than just straight facts, that will celebrate the human experience, is always in my efforts. It's how I was taught, by many people, as well as the writers of SI and The Sporting News and Baseball Digest and Sport magazine and Inside Sports and Baseball Magazine.

Every once in awhile, at my job, I receive a glimmer, that people really do still care about the printed word, at least a little bit. Earlier this week, during all the down news, I received an email at work from the assistant girls basketball coach at a tiny high school way up north. She wanted to know what the deadline was for reporting results "because some of the girls look forward to reading about it in the paper every day."

Imagine that. Teenage girls. In 2024. Reading some aspect, any aspect, of a newspaper. Maybe we can nudge "the end" a minute or two farther into the future.