ESPN The Magazine

» see espn.com/magazine as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

espn the magazine was american sports for a slightly younger audience than sports illustrated. it launched 11 march 1998 with an oversized landscape format and a foldout cover meant to look nothing like si. the pitch was youth-coded: bigger photos, more graphics, less prose, aimed at readers who thought si was for their dad. it worked for two decades and then espn realized the print magazine was pulling less than espn.com did in a normal news day.

the first cover had kobe bryant, alex rodriguez, kordell stewart plus eric lindros folded across a triple gatefold. john papanek was the founding editor, coming from si and taking a piece of that magazine's vocabulary with him. the format ran biweekly (26 issues a year), later 24, later monthly. peak subscription was 2,144,483 in june 2018, which is close to si's peak but a lot cheaper to run because espn was the underlying brand paying the bills.

on 30 april 2019 espn announced the print title would end that september. the last issue was the body issue, a signature annual feature that started in 2009 as a counter to si's swimsuit issue. after the paper title ended, espn launched something called "espn cover story," a digital monthly with a poster-style hero image and a magazine-length profile. it is not the same thing. the print run lasted 21 years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ born as anti-si ~

the whole point of espn the magazine was that it was not sports illustrated. si was 44 years old in 1998, still the dominant american sports weekly, and espn had built up as much cultural pull on cable television that it needed a print asset to complete the brand stack. so disney funded a magazine designed to sit next to si on the newsstand and grab a different demographic. bigger photos, shorter pieces, statistics as design element, and a heavier lean on nba and hollywood-athlete crossover coverage. it worked. by the mid-2000s espn the magazine was profitable in a way most magazines that decade were not.

~ the body issue ~

the body issue launched in october 2009 as a full-page-photograph feature of nude athletes shot for form and musculature. it was pitched as anti-swimsuit-issue: less cheesecake, more anatomy, professional athletes across the widest range of sport disciplines the editors could book. it was also the annual that sold the most copies. the last print issue in september 2019 was a body issue, which was probably the correct way to end the run.

~ how espn+ swallowed it ~

espn+ launched 12 april 2018 as disney's direct-to-consumer streaming push. every dollar of subscription revenue that espn+ could pull was more valuable than a print magazine subscription because the streaming service also fed disney+ bundling economics. by early 2019 the internal math on the magazine no longer added up against the cost of paper, printing, plus mailing. the april 30 announcement was clean and the shutdown was clean. no drawn-out ownership shuffle like si had.

~ what got buried ~

the alternative american sports magazine as a category. there is no biweekly on the newsstand now that operates in the space espn the magazine held. what is left is sports twitter and the athletic, plus podcasts run by ex-magazine writers. the print biweekly with a foldout cover is not coming back.

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