Sports Illustrated (weekly print)

» see si.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

american football never landed in turkey. major league baseball never landed in turkey. sports illustrated was built for a country that watched both every week. i was aware of it the way i was aware of the yankees cap and the super bowl halftime show: something americans took seriously enough that the rest of the world had to learn its vocabulary.

time inc launched si on 16 august 1954. eddie mathews of the milwaukee braves on the first cover, mid-swing. henry luce pushed it hard even though early ad revenue was thin. by the 1960s it had solved the format: long-form sports writing on saturday-glossy paper, arriving in american mailboxes each thursday in time for the weekend. dan jenkins and frank deford filed to it. gary smith wrote 12,000-word pieces on athletes and the magazine ran them. the swimsuit issue started in january 1964 as a piece of winter filler and turned into an annual event that outgrew the magazine around it.

the weekly cadence held for 63 years. then in early 2018 si dropped to biweekly (27 issues a year plus the swimsuit issue), which was the polite word for cutting a magazine in half. march 2020 dropped it again, to monthly. by then time inc had sold to meredith, meredith had sold the brand to authentic brands, and the editorial operation had been licensed out to a company called maven / arena group. authentic later moved it to minute media. the print title still exists on paper somewhere in that chain. the weekly american sports magazine, the object with a specific rhythm and a specific place on the kitchen table each thursday, does not.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

si worked because american sports were a monoculture in the second half of the 20th century. the nfl, the nba, mlb, the ncaa tournament, and boxing occupied common ground across regions and generations. si was the print house of record for that consensus. a bad cover story could ruin an athlete's public image for a decade. a great one could canonize a coach. the writers were often as famous as their subjects, which is not a claim many magazines could ever make.

~ the swimsuit anchor ~

the swimsuit issue started with a five-page cover feature in january 1964 by a bored assistant editor filling a slow news month. by the 1980s it was routinely the year's top-selling issue. by the 2000s it was a standalone brand with a television special and a global press junket. more people knew si for swimsuits than for sports at some point in the 1990s, which was probably not the outcome luce envisioned.

~ how the weekly ended ~

the internet took the game recaps and espn took the highlights. twitter took the reactions faster than any weekly could. sports writers moved to podcasts and later to substack. si tried to hold the middle by expanding online (si.com launched in 1995, one of the earlier newsroom websites), but the weekly print product needed advertisers who wanted to reach 3 million households, and that advertiser did not exist by 2015. meredith bought time inc in 2018 and started cutting. by january that year the weekly was gone.

~ what got buried ~

the long-form sports feature as a mainstream american art form. gary smith could spend six months on a single piece, and si would ship the whole 12,000 words on glossy paper. that model is dead. what survived is the swimsuit issue as a brand and the si name as a licensable asset that gets stapled to whatever the current owner is trying to sell. the magazine as a working weekly is not coming back.

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