No. 158: SPORTS ILLUSTRATED & DREW ORTIZ, SALT LAKE CITY & MEDICINE HAT I / The industry standard has crashed down like my dream freelance assignment years ago

The famous sports mag was disgraced when its use of AI-generated copy & the creation of fully fictional staffers was reported. My enterprise years ago was a case of AS: Authentic Stupidity.

I heaved a heavier sigh than usual last week when I read about Sports Illustrated reaching its nadir or at least a nadir until the next deeper, darker one comes along.

Once the Tiffany brand in sportswriting, a jewel in the Time-Life crown, SI suffered like all others in a mag market with the collapse of advertising in the advent of the online era. It avoided shuttering, which is to say that it fared better than Inside Sport, which Newsweek positioned as competition to SI in ‘79, and Sport, which went altogether lighter on the reverence and sanctimony.

Issue 1, Volume 1 with Eddie Matthews the unnamed cover boy

As a start-up back in the 50s SI was a huge money-losing proposition but that was considered simply as an affordable investment. A decade or so out of the blocks in the 21st century, it was once again a huge money-losing proposition with no apparent road forward and in 2019 Time-Life sold it to an outfit these days called The Arena Group, nothing more than a bunch of charlatans.