Sports Illustrated implosion shows the ugly, ongoing collapse of U.S. journalism

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/24/sports-illustrated-implosion-perfectly-encapsulates-the-ugly-ongoing-collapse-of-u-s-journalism/

by rntn • 2 years ago

123 138 2 years ago

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andrewclunn• 2 years ago

So a sports magazine that has been renting out its brand for decades is now representative of "real journalism?" I'm not sure "real journalists" would appreciate that conflation. Unless of course the comparison is apt, in which case "real journalism" died long ago.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

Renting out the brand and/or selling their soul for clicks is a pretty common path predating the final implosion in a lot of cases. Forbes, National Geographic, and I'm sure countless others.

DebtDeflation• 2 years ago

I had to explain to someone at work the other day that Forbes is just a blogging platform now and Newsweek is a tabloid that's been sold to new owners like 4 times over the last decade. These are not the publications you remember from the 1990s. And yes, there are countless other examples.

Waterluvian2• 2 years ago

The state of journalism and politics are a symptom of the epidemic of fear centres running the show and attention spans that are much too short. We’re progressing well on our path to fitting into our new niche as a more globalized, digital species.

mschuster913• 2 years ago

It's not just that. A significant problem is monetization:

- you got amateurs (bloggers, social media) being capable of running very fast and high-quality journalism on very low budgets (as the barrier to entry is extremely low, all you need for a vlog these days is a basic iPhone) that can be covered by donations, sponsorships (patreon) or merch

- you got nation-state actors (aka troll farms and content farms [1]) that churn out tons of content for free

- classic print journalism has seen advertising income drastically collapse as ad budgets shifted towards the Internet

- the tradition of reading a newspaper at breakfast has gone, either because people have no time for that any more or because they're reading on their phones

- people lack the money to spend on newspapers

- people are sick of being advertised to all the time, ad blockers significantly impact anything from web pages to Youtube

All in all, high-quality long form journalism (especially investigative reporting) takes serious amounts of money, time and legal risk, but the finance base for this has gone down the drain.

Some media has escaped the fate of their fellows by being bought up by some rich person, but that carries ethical challenges on its own.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/

Waterluvian2• 2 years ago

I generally agree. But I see a lot of that as exacerbating symptoms, not cause. I still believe that demand comes before supply for this kind of thing. There’s a mental market for the pablum.

throw0101d• 2 years ago

you got amateurs (bloggers, social media) being capable of running very fast and high-quality journalism on very low budgets (as the barrier to entry is extremely low, all you need for a vlog these days is a basic iPhone)

What is the definition of "journalism"? Are there particular examples that you are thinking of for these 'amateurs'? How many 'amateurs' have broken stories which involved going into archives, chasing down leads, interviewing the principles involved, etc?

As compared to [vb]logs (re-)reporting a story that was originally broken by a 'non-amateur'?

michaelrpeskin3• 2 years ago

Your first bullet is totally correct, barrier to entry has collapsed and it's easy to do high-quality journalism without the backing of an institution. The people who are good journalists that people want to read have gone to platforms like Substack where they can directly monetize their work. The mediocre journalist stay with the institutions, so there's a net talent drain from the publishers. Which leads to lower quality work and that causes more subscribers to leave (of course annoying ads and everything contribute), and as you say the finance base has gone down the drain.

I see it as a net positive, you have a decentralized distributed group of investitive journalists who are directly reliant on their subscriber base rather than the political whims of the institution. So they are more incentivized to do good work and are harder to silence when the go against the powers-that-be.

It's a shift to merit (are you a good journalist) from credentialism (the BigPublisherCo gives you a job as a writer).

wombatpm• 2 years ago

- classic print journalism has seen advertising income drastically collapse as ad budgets shifted towards the Internet

Print used to have dedicated sales people who had relationships with agencies and brands and could connect those organizations with a dedicated and defined audience. Both sides were vetted. And if any problems occurred there was a responsible and responsive party to fix things. Marketing people could rest easy at night knowing their ad for khaki pants would not be next to photos of white supremists marching in New York wearing khakis.

They gave that all up for the opportunity to show ads for the CatTurd NTF at $0.50 per thousand impressions. You know what defeats ad blocking? Serving the ads from your own servers.

In the end they gave it all away to Google and Meta because they were shortsighted. Just like Sears ended their catalog operations leaving the field open for an Amazon.

I’m waiting for someone to propose gathering all of the quality posts from Medium and Substack on a specific topic or interest area and publish them together for a dedicated audience. They could do this on a periodic basis.

snide• 2 years ago

Seeing Sports Illustrated fall is a bummer. This was a mainstay, important read for millions back in the day. As a kid I grew up with SI, and the brand was so large there were even offshot magazines (SI for Kids...etc).

My childhood was spent pouring over Sports, Nature, and Gaming magazines. While the web has provide a lot of that information in a much easier to search way, the discovery mechanisms that a smaller, but more focused set of media brands created were fantastic. You could rely on people having read / scene the larger touchstones of culture and it led to more connection.

There are a lot of great things about the Internet and the specification of news / knowledge, but part of me worries that the division we're seeing in society are a direct result of folks not having reliable sources of shared experience.

I don't know how to solve it. I worked in publishing for over a dozen years, and it only seems to be getting worse and worse.

mlrtime3• 2 years ago

I'm not a huge sports fan. I'd rather play than watch but I did have a SI subscription as a kid. As a teen, I thougfhrly enjoyed the swimsuit editions.

However, IMHO the article has missed it. Article claims that SI is a failure because "Real Journalism" is dying and SI should have used real writers.

I don't think so, SI has been falling (like a lot of print) since the internet. Sports people want to read and talk about sports, SI was that outlet and they've lost the marginal subscriber. Now there are limitless places to go for a sports fix.

SI was doomed from the beginning and lack of "Real Journalism" wouldn't have saved it.

The real interesting question is does the brand still have value (Maybe not 1M/month) and what to do with it now.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

I don't remember during exactly what period I had an SI subscription (I was much more into sports long ago) but at one point I probably was subscribing to 20 magazines. Today I don't pay for one. (Though I do have a couple of digital subscriptions I pay for.)

And I probably dropped many of them before the quality deterioration became obvious. They just didn't fill a real need any longer and they were just piling up on my coffee table.

tqi4• 2 years ago

Sports journalism has also never been a paragon of "real journalism." While there are certainly examples of great investigative pieces, much of what is written is dependent on access to and cultivating relationships with the subjects themselves (who in turn needed the media outlets for public exposure). With the internet and social media, athletes seem have decided to cut out the middleman via a slew of their own podcasts/yt channels/IG feeds.

notnaut• 2 years ago

Maybe the solution starts with the next generation of parents who have seen the direct harm the internet in its current state poses to human mental/social development.

Maybe (hopefully sooner rather than later) these parents enforce restrictions or come together to form networks that have the ability to provide some consistency and deep rooted social interaction with clear links directly to the real world, but not tied down to it, away from the giants of advertising that will always feed their users sugar and no veggies.

Maybe, of course, this has to take the form of a product that generates revenue, and maybe that makes the entire vision of a healthy widely-adopted internet an impossibility.

shmatt• 2 years ago

This has nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with the term “brand recognition”

The boomer concept of the 80s that we can’t get rid of. People still think something is high or low quality because some licensed logo of a company that ceased operations 20 years ago is on it

That Calvin Klein jacket from tj maxx? No calvin Klein employee had ever even seen its design before. Your Toshiba TV was not made or designed by Toshiba

We need to step away from the 80s and start focusing on quality instead of logo playing cards being traded between billionaires

glitchc• 2 years ago

It calls into the question the very notion of teams in all professional sports. What does it mean to support a team when a quarter of the players change every year, and the entire roster is brand new every five years? What's left in ManchesterU if you take away the brand?

All that means to say is that too much money is tied to branding, and individuals, corporations and countries will continue to ride this cash cow for as long as it lasts.

frangolino• 2 years ago

how can customers quickly assess quality of a good? brands had a reputation

joebob422• 2 years ago

The nice thing about brands is it (used to be) a good standin for quality.

Costco is still sort of like this for me. If I need $thing, I can just go get whichever brand of thing Costco is selling. There are usually only a couple choices, and they're generally pretty decent and good value.

In the absence of branding like this, I need to go make an informed decision on every purchase, in product areas I'm often not particularly familiar with or qualified to judge. The dazzling array of widgets available in whatever category doesn't help if I can't tell a good from a bad widget, can't trust online reviews, and can't take "made by $brand_i_know" as a badge of it probably being fine.

I agree we've lost this to a large degree, but I do think it's more of a shame than you seem to be suggesting.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

can't trust online reviews

I don't think that's universally true. I may not trust Amazon user reviews a whole lot. I least I need to interpret them. But, in my experience, something like Wirecutter won't lead you that far astray. Probably not Consumer Reports either although I don't subscribe.

tim3333• 2 years ago

Brand recognition is still a thing. Apple is doing ok for example. It's not really just an 80s boomer concept.

fullshark• 2 years ago

Magazines are dead, go to a grocery store and see what's on display in the checkout line. The most recent iteration of Sports Illustrated was just about squeezing the last ounce of revenue you could from an already dead brand/product.

mlrtime3• 2 years ago

I'd hargue SI has brand value for now. It needs to be reinvented away from print magazine.

apocalyptic0n33• 2 years ago

Even if they were to reinvent away from print, the market is so congested they'd never find a customer base again. Sports news can be had, for free, from hundreds, perhaps thousands of websites. The big news gets broken, again for free, on Twitter by the likes of Woj/Chams (NBA).

Long form sports journalism already has a large, struggling entity: The Athletic. Beyond that, every major publication in the country covers long form sports stories in some shape or form.

Highlights and analysis can be found on YouTube (for free) and the websites, podcasts, and social media accounts for each league/team. Not to mention the heavyweights like ESPN and TSN, who also focus more on the entertainment side of it.

Then you have discussion, which already freely happens on Reddit, various blogs, Twitter, and other social media.

The market is incredibly saturated from every single angle. Even with the brand value of Sports Illustrated, finding a profitable niche would be incredibly difficult.

bdcravens2• 2 years ago

They have brand value, but less than a few years ago, which is when they should have reinvented. At this point they're close to the "Toys-R-Us" level of brand value: remembered by the previous generation, and seen as a relic by the current.

whitej125• 2 years ago

Matt Levine (of MoneyStuff/BBG) covered the events[1] of the oddness that led up to the eventual layoffs. His perspective seems to convey that the layoffs were not a "AI can replace staff" play but more so... there was a lot of shady (or mis-executed) corporate dealing and the layoffs were tied to Arena losing its license.

The reason behind that license loss is a contradiction between the two sources. TechDirt seems to imply that it was a renegotiation tactic where as Levine seems to imply that it was chaotic at post-Merger Arena and they were just dropping the ball on their debt and licensing obligations. Maybe a little of column A and a little of column B.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-23/sports...

dpflan• 2 years ago

This comment should be way higher, the details by Levine reveal much more about the situation.

basch2• 2 years ago

There is also the fact that this incarnation of Sports Illustrated is only about 4 years old. The previous company got gutted in 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/sports-illustrateds-new-operato...

Whatever existed from 2019-2023 was SI in Name Only. The website was absolute trash. I'm guilty of not having picked up the paper magazine in that timeframe.

slowmovintarget2• 2 years ago

It really is a shame that some random entity can "rent" the brand name from some holding corporation and pretend to be "Sports Illustrated."

bell-cot• 2 years ago

Um, yes? If your society is completely controlled by a tiny Greed-Is-Our-Only-God plutocracy, and nothing is protected from financialization - then what sacred-to-you cow do you really expect to survive, long-term?

);

cobrabyte• 2 years ago

The magazine chugged along for decades before changing its identity and recipe to appease a small group of non-customers. It's no surprise it's going away.

Spivak• 2 years ago

This seems like a perfect case study of what happens when the actual business, farming eyeballs to sell ads, is at odds with the customer and the core product and enshittification, the act of implementing customer-observable cost cutting and hoping the brand carries you. Clearly a deadly combination as you knocked out both pillars propping the company up.

If you keep the quality up you can likely get away with your thumb on the ad button but if you drop the quality at the same time there's no value left.

coffeeisgud4u• 2 years ago

SI hardly has been "real" journalism for quite some time. They slowly let journalist go over the last two decades and has shifted its coverage over time to match what internet-based sites were doing.

In doing so, it killed whatever advantage they had analyzing sports - you could get season preview articles from other avenues as good or better than SI. Nevermind the disaster of its "Swimsuit" issues (which, honestly, is good riddance, but it was a known part of the brand.)

MattGaiser• 2 years ago

I am not an avid sports follower, so I only know of the brand from the Swimsuit editions. I am surprised to learn they were once somewhat journalistic in nature.

basch2• 2 years ago

It was a weekly magazine. Part of its allure was how topical and quick the turnaround was. Transitioning it to monthly was a billed as a blood letting but really a nail.

eitally2• 2 years ago

It's not at all a collapse of journalism. It's a collapse of the print periodical with a content focus on topical current events. There just isn't a need for that specific kind of journalism anymore, and for the majority of topics that do demand journalistic investment, it makes 100% more sense to focus on online than print anyway (looking at things like The Economist and Foreign Policy, or The Atlantic and New Yorker). I'd argue high quality journalistic work is supremely valuable but it needs to be targeted, and lots of legacy news properties (NYT, The Guardian, etc) have been doing that -- online, often with multimedia and interactive stories.

It's the same with scientific journals. Yes, print journals are a thing, but who actually uses them anymore, even in higher ed?

The challenge, of course, is convincing netizens to pay for your content, or freeing it in a way that isn't alienating to readers.

(fwiw, I subscribe to a couple of print magazines for my 1st grader. I think they're great for kids!)

rwmj• 2 years ago

Private Eye (in the UK) is thriving as a paper publication without very much of an online presence. Audited circulation of nearly a quarter of a million (https://www.abc.org.uk/product/3379).

some_random2• 2 years ago

What's the consumer base like? I highly doubt that 20-40 year olds are reading it much if that's the case

s_dev• 2 years ago

There is a Michellin starred restaurant operating in Greenland that people travel all that way to. Sometimes certain things succeed despite choosing circumstances that work against them and not because of those choices. That same restaurant would be making a lot more money if it moved to New York city but the Chef probably doesn't want that.

Private Eye would have more money and more eyeballs if it had a sufficient online presence but the simple answer is Ian Hislop doesn't want that and I would imagine he would say "We're doing just fine, having not invested a lot in to online presence for Private Eye" and he'd be right.

What works for Private Eye might not work for the New York Times.

adhesive_wombat• 2 years ago

That's a funny one too me, because they do some very good journalism that spans many many years on many people up to no good. Frequently, they're the only ones doing anything more investigative than rewriting press releases and newswires and they must have an absolutely enormous library of material on public figures to be able to connect the dots that they do.

But when they report on something, it's gone from the public view in a few weeks as the only place you could find it would be your own archive, assuming it goes back that far (and you wish to dedicate the space in your house), or a major library of which there are only a handful in the country that would maintain an indefinite archive.

Something more impactful than a report on another suspiciously "bungled" contract by a councillor would be to be able to see the other articles they've done on that person over the decades. Even if there was, say, a year-long delay in putting them in the archive, there's a difference between "Eyes passim" (doubly irritating as there's also no thematic index and hundreds of back issues you'd need to look in) and seeing the older reports in front of you.

jimbokun• 2 years ago

The Athletic is outstanding, and they fit very well into the New York Times model, who purchased them.

Former players and managers writing for them, in depth coverage of almost every sports team, stats guys doing deep dive analyses, insiders with lots of connections to break stories on trade and transfer deals, a nice daily email summarizing the previous days sporting news.

I gladly pay their subscription fee.

So I agree. Sports Illustrated dying does not entail the death of sports journalism. Just means other institutions are doing it better.

BadCookie• 2 years ago

This argument would be more convincing if The Athletic weren’t also losing millions of dollars a year.

“Since The New York Times Co. acquired The Athletic for $550 million in January 2022, the site has had a total operating loss of more than $43 million, even as subscribers have more than doubled to 3.27 million over the same span.”

Source: https://frontofficesports.com/the-athletic-lays-off-20-journ...

Timshel• 2 years ago

It's not at all a collapse of journalism. It's a collapse of the print periodical with a content focus on topical current events

Don't know they were quite happy with their digital transition in nov 22: https://pressroom.si.com/press-releases/arena-group-reports-...

dogleash• 2 years ago

I'd argue high quality journalistic work is supremely valuable but it needs to be targeted

Ok, sure, I can agree so far.

and lots of legacy news properties (NYT, The Guardian, etc) have been doing that

And you've lost me. the high-status outlets that survived the online transition are doing "rushed college essay"-tier work at best. Where's the "high quality journalistic work"?

I recently realized I should compare the news to the non-fiction I'm reading all the time. It's not THE NEWS but whats the real difference between one 500-to-5000 word explainer for newbs and another? One is the news because it's supposed to be important. Otherwise it'd be an obscure subject matter explainer like the other shit I'm reading. And god damn is the news embarrassing themselves.

SpicyLemonZest• 2 years ago

The difference is that the news, because it's attempting to explain things that are happening now, doesn't have the luxuries of time or hindsight that contribute to the quality of other nonfiction. Campaign coverage is probably the best example of this: any good nonfiction author will recognize that there's no way to write a book about it until it's done, but journalists kinda fundamentally have to offer play-by-play commentary.

eitally2• 2 years ago

The majority of what the rags do is not high quality, but a fraction of where they spend their time is. I'd put basically all of the NYTimes' Interactive work in that category -- here's an example I was just reading yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/28/climate/groun...

And here's a WaPo example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/take...

Similarly, The Guardian on the Panama Papers: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/panama-papers

----

Somebody has the report "the news" and that's both untrustworthy and commoditized at this point, but it's not like traditional newspapers aren't also doing any investigative journalism, or intentionally not adopting multimedia methods of presentation.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

I subscribe to The Economist in print and haven't even bothered to create an online account paired to my subscription.

c0pium• 2 years ago

I don’t understand the point of comments like this, are you trying to refute their point with a single anecdote? Why not add some context or explanation?

Karellen• 2 years ago

The challenge, of course, is convincing netizens to pay for your content, or freeing it in a way that isn't alienating to readers.

I like the LWN.net model, where "Brief items" that are essentially links to stories on other sites (but with their own comment section) are free to everyone, and their original journalism is free to paying subscribers for 1-2 weeks, and then free to everyone else after that.

If you're not a subscriber and want to see take on any topic, you can with a fairly short delay. If you want to see their historic output, either for research purposes, or just to get an idea of the consistency of their output, no problem.

It's only if you want to see their original work right now, or participate in their comments while the article is fresh, and you're happy that it's the kind of content you want to pay for, then you can. And there are multiple membership tiers (without much to distinguish them) so you can, to a limited degree, settle on a membership level that you feel is fair value.

https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#subs

I read LWN.net for free for ages, before deciding that, yes, this was a site whose journalism I was actually happy to pay for.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

Publishers have never been journalists. For a while, they needed journalists because every genre of print newspaper/magazine had an empirically determined percentage of ads over which subscriptions dropped, so there almost always had to be some content as filler to cut the ads down to that ratio. That equilibrium seems to have gone, in a way René Thom might have predicted.

ghaff7• 2 years ago

Content being the thing you put around the ads (the ad hole as a former boss called it) was a truer description in things like trade rags and Computer Shopper. IMO, it's a bit uncharitable for magazines like SI in their prime although, of course, their revenues were heavily dependent as well--even if they sold subscriptions.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

When would "SI in their prime" be? It looks like Luce really did care about the editorial side of the house (rather than just grudgingly grant it its independence), but he died in 1967...

fortran772• 2 years ago

All the people here who don't want to pay for news, entertainment, or music are to blame.

krapp2• 2 years ago

All of the corporations that treated the internet like a wild west gravy train of free money where quality doesn't matter, and that poisoned it with dark patterns, SEO, gimmicks, parasitic advertising and now AI, are to blame for not making their news, entertainment or music worth paying for.

Don't offer free lemonade, piss in our mouths then expect payment and a gratuity. That's not how anything works.

fortran772• 2 years ago

Did the traditional print magazines do that?

CM302• 2 years ago

Or perhaps there's just more competition in each of those areas, and you don't need to pay anymore?

If hundreds or thousands of people and businesses are giving something away for free, and your company is charging money for the same thing, it shouldn't be too surprising that it's having trouble competing with the former.

hedora• 2 years ago

Welcome to the age of zombie copyright holding companies.

National Geographic also went out of business last year, in that they now employ zero writers (Disney is the majority owner).

Warner Brothers Discovery Corp is performing a similar wind-down of the operations they own (they cut $3B from production budgets last year), and is hoping to apply the same thing to Paramount's holdings after their proposed acquisition is approved.

In particular, CNN and CBS will be owned by the resulting company, and there will be plenty more journalists to fire at the resulting conglomerate (WBD laid off a bunch of reporters at CNN last year as part of a pivot to cater to the Fox News audience).

The above is an obvious-in-hindsight side effect of having copyrights that basically never expire. Maybe after they've all burned themselves to ash (and stop bribing congress) we'll be able to repeal the Sonny Bono / Micky Mouse Protection Act.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

The above is an obvious-in-hindsight side effect of having copyrights that basically never expire.

Shorter copyright was not going to save CNN/CBS’s video news model. It’s an enormously inefficient way to get information.

dirtyhippiefree• 2 years ago

News aggregators using video as news is actually on the rise, not the decline…

ProjectArcturis• 2 years ago

The names of businesses are trademarks, not copyrights. They never expire as long as the business keeps operating. Which is as it should be -- should I be able to open a restaurant called McDonald's just because the real McDonald's has been in business for 75 years?

pjlegato• 2 years ago

Mickey Mouse entered the public domain a few weeks ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/arts/public-domain-mickey...

hamburga• 2 years ago

My 11-year-old subscribes to SI and loves it and will miss it.

Yes, there are other sources of sports news online, but I don’t want my kids clutching their iPad and Chromebook every waking minute.

Print journalism/media is an antidote to the distraction epidemic and our capitalist overlords are actively hollowing it all out.

But at the end of the day, we’re the consumers, and we still have the choice to pay for professional journalism if we care about the truth.

some_random2• 2 years ago

As someone who grew up past these days, I'm curious how much the swimsuit edition pushed SI subscriptions. I'd imagine that in a world of print, publishing plausibly deniable softcore porn would be a huge advantage that is completely irrelevant now.

anotheruser13• 2 years ago

In a past life, I worked for Time Inc. The SI swimsuit issue was a big driver for subscriptions, especially when the premium was an SI swimsuit calendar. The football phone, not so much.

tqi4• 2 years ago

As a result journalism — sports or otherwise — is steadily being replaced by a parade of automated gibberish, clickbait, well-funded propaganda, and marketing, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find anybody with the ethics and resources interested in reversing — or even combating — the trajectory.

Journalists love to paint themselves as noble victims of technology, as if they bear no responsibility for the polarization and resulting erosion of public trust in authority. Sports journalists where especially guilty of cultivating cozy relationships with their subjects (access journalism), pushing their own pre determined narratives, and blurring the lines between reporting and opinion. It's not hard to understand why people have turned to other sources.

sschueller• 2 years ago

It's also laziness and pressure to output more and more.

zdragnar• 2 years ago

Lol, the print version barely had any content at all. SI and GQ have been sending me magazines every other month or so for two years between the two of them, trying to get me to subscribe.

One upshot here is at least SI will stop spamming me via snail mail.

infamouscow2• 2 years ago

Laziness and financial pressure don't explain why the SI swimsuit issue deviated away from their winning formula just to appease minority groups never interesting in SI to begin with.

It doesn't take a genius to know alienating the majority of your audience is bad for business.

justinzollars2• 2 years ago

Increasingly difficult to find anybody with the ethics and resources interested in reversing — or even combating — the trajectory.

This is a pessimistic view. Media has never been richer. Facts can no longer be hidden.

ben_w• 2 years ago

Facts can no longer be hidden.

Except by a firehose of falsehoods, which was cheap even before LLMs: https://xkcd.com/1019/

cafard• 2 years ago

I doubt any of this matters compared to the loss of advertising. If the classified ads still were what they were in 1990, newspapers could source their news from National Enquirer and government press releases and still afford a large staff.

tqi4• 2 years ago

That's a very good point

zackmorris• 2 years ago

Correct. The parent isn't wrong about the loss of objectivity in journalism, just the reason(s) behind it.

What we perceive today as bias and censorship are symptoms of the loss of independently funded journalism, which is now captured by corporations due to how they direct ad dollars towards narratives which support their own public relations. This started with the loss of the Fairness Doctrine under the Reagan administration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

Its loss was so important because it removed the payment stream which was previously provided by other programs on a media network. In other words, the news now had to pay its own way through ads shown during the broadcast, rather than from the network's general fund. Which gives guests leverage to remove those ad dollars when interviews don't go well.

Then the Telecommunications Act under Clinton removed the barriers separating broadcast from print news, allowing one corporation to own all of the news in a city/region, which led to the rise of today's handful of wealthy multinational media conglomerates which mainly broadcast infotainment/propaganda:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

The fix is to do the opposite of the pieces of legislation that created this situation, mainly:

1) Bar advertisers from influencing journalism

2) Create independent funding sources for journalism by giving it special treatment as the Fourth Estate (branch) of our government of the people and by the people, for the preservation of the American way of life

The main barrier to these is the political right in the US, which doesn't want any limitation on free speech, or any taxes supporting nonessential government programs. The political left also silently maintains the status quo by profiting from it. Which pushes both parties towards a one-party equivalent where corporations determine government policy by framing debates in ways that steer people towards voting against their own self-interest to relieve their cognitive dissonance.

So the real problem is how to convince a disenfranchised, overworked and overtaxed population that the answer is more regulation and taxes. I feel that other solutions won't work, because they don't address the fundamental issues. Meaning that they would favor dogma over fact-based analysis and historical understanding.

We also have to remember that news has always spread regardless of medium, so the existence of the internet is a red herring. Funding is the real issue.

the_snooze• 2 years ago

I think it's easy to have your view because of the dominance of nationalized news and the associated broad-brush political cheerleading those outlets like to engage in. Where there's been real damage to value is at the local level. Who's keeping track of businesses opening and closing? Or what the county board is spending taxpayer money on? Or why the police department has such low incident clearance rates? Alternative sources and AI won't put a dent in covering those less polarizing but important practical topics.

slowmovintarget2• 2 years ago

Damage at the local level seems to be deliberate. There are a tiny handful of large news organizations that have been busy buying up local newspapers, then gutting them.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o...

specialist2• 2 years ago

Yup. No truer words were said than the Washington Post's (unintentionally ironic) slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness."

tqi4• 2 years ago

I would actually push back a bit on the importance of local news. I grew up in a midwest college town that had a fairly robust local newspaper, and my recollection of it was that it was a) poorly written and b) mostly focused on local sports and crime. While its mere presence may helped keep local officials accountable for their actions, I can't recall times where they broke local scandals. I have seen a few studies that have linked the decline in local news to things like polarization or increased municipal waste[1][2], but imo their ability to isolate cause and effect is very limited.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555

specialist2• 2 years ago

That's like blaming the grunts flipping burgers for McDonald's terrible food.

Policymakers, owners, publishers, and even editors are to blame for the enshittification of our Fourth Estate.

For a primer: 1/2 of the "Fit To Print" documentary details how corporate raider Neuharth started the "infotainment" doom loop with USA Today in 1982. (The other 1/2 shows the hero's journey of one person still doing investigative journalism, at great personal expense and sacrifice.)

TLDR: Neuharth guaranteed Wall St 15% returns, achieved by gutting newsrooms and labor. This forced the competition to follow suit, to appease their own investors.

There are many other villains. Reagan Admin ended the Fairness Doctrine. Clinton Admin encouraged consolidation, thereby destroying local media. Etc, etc.

https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/fit-to-print

https://tubitv.com/movies/682467/fit-to-print

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2721376/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Neuharth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Today

horns4lyfe4• 2 years ago

The only thing it shows is the collapse of Sports Illustrated. Just look at any of their recent magazines, especially the swimsuit issues to see how far they’ve gone out of their way to alienate their audience. I mean, one of the covers for the swimsuits this year was Martha Stewart. Who is that for?

mp05• 2 years ago

especially the swimsuit issues to see how far they’ve gone out of their way to alienate their audience.

Horny 11 year olds?

horns4lyfe4• 2 years ago

Horny dudes in general, ya. That’s their audience, guys who like sports and attractive women. Again, who is the audience for Martha Stewart on the cover?

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

I mean, one of the covers for the swimsuits this year was Martha Stewart. Who is that for?

I mean, it'd fit the demographics of anyone still buying Sports Illustrated swimsuit magazines pretty well. Anyone under 60 presumably just... finds porn online.

horns4lyfe4• 2 years ago

Old dudes don’t all of a sudden stop wanting to see young women in swimsuits though. There was also a trans woman on one cover. So again, who is that for, that would actually pay for it?

Simulacra• 2 years ago

Journalism is no longer a noble calling, to report the facts and inform the public. The people who are going into journalism, and the companies who are masquerading as sources of news and information, are more interested in propaganda and a specific point of view. Journalist motives cannot be trusted anymore.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

Around Ithaca, NY the local government is thinking about defunding the daily "paper of record" (which gets paid to run legal announcements) because it has been superseded by weekly papers and online local news. The Ithaca Journal seems to get thinner every week and, besides those legal notices and the spam want-ads to recruit you to cash checks for money laundering, is mostly full of syndicated news. 20 years ago I would always run into reporters from the Ithaca Journal at public meetings but now they are absent.

The good news is that there are two weekly print newspapers

https://www.tompkinsweekly.com/ https://www.ithaca.com/

and at least one pure online play

http://ithacavoice.org/

not to mention another weekly paper oriented entirely towards entertainment, culture, dining and stuff like that.

If you accept the idea that the generation rate of local news in a small city is too low to justify a daily paper than the transition from daily to weekly which improved economics is a good thing. Seen that way we're in a golden age of journalism in Ithaca. I've seen weekly papers be successful in many other locations but usually in the form of the "entertainment, culture, and dining" paper. Here in Tompkins though our weeklies are so good who needs a daily?

DoingSomeThings• 2 years ago

Here in Texas the Community Impact newspaper has been growing with a monthly print edition. They serve local content with multiple editions per city. ~50% of the content is broader city related and ~50% specific to the suburb / neighborhood. I find it incredibly helpful to keep up with local govt, business development, etc.

It's free and ships via mail monthly. I never signed up, it simply shows up. Their website[1] says they currently publish 40+ distinct editions across Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio.

I have no idea how their finances work, but they seemingly found a model that could possibly be duplicated elsewhere.

[1] https://communityimpact.com/corporate-about/

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

For one thing I think advertisers get the same amount of value out of an ad in a weekly that they get in a daily.

mihaaly• 2 years ago

Forgive my ignorance towards watching and reading about sports, so being someone for whom the Sports Illustrated broke the surface of attention in the past four decades only when clickbait portals reported about the new year's swimsuit calendar or when it was mentioned - for the very same reason - in teenager movies from Hollywood but this all leads to being very content and a bit bored when the demise of journalism is illustrated by the fate of Sports Illustrated, that is now known for "been tossed around between a rotating crop of dodgy international middlemen for whom journalism was an afterthought". Probably there could be better illustration than Sports Illustrated for the collapse of classic journalism, other than the tired and loong worn out Sports Illustrated? (which feels like being a string of letters only, the aging and drying out milk cow of the expressively named Authentic Brands Group that sounds like a warehouse of famous whatevers for shady whoevers trying to shave pennies off of the memory of once significant things that meant something for people once, but not anymore, not really, stopped having content but still having a nostalgic and fading facade)

bigtex• 2 years ago

https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2023/05/15/kim-petras-featu...

AndrewKemendo• 2 years ago

The concept that sports news constitutes journalism is a bigger sign that there was never anything real to begin with.

Might as well say that the decline of seventeen magazine and daily bread (rollerblading magazine) were indications of journalism’s decay.

Journalism is about holding powerful interests accountable

A popular sports tabloid - even if it does do deep “reporting” isn’t journalism by any stretch

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

"The Arena Group", brand renting....

It doesn't sound like "Sports Illustrated" is journalism. Unless they were trying to make the point that brand-name-uber-alles was the decline of journalism it sounds like the publication should just die already.

I don't doubt that actual journalism is being eviscerated but they didn't give me any good examples in their piece.

6R1M0R4CL3• 2 years ago

when you start putting half naked chicks on the cover instead of putting women that are real athletes... you've jumped the shark.

the world if filled with amazing female athletes. you can do a mix of 50/50 for covers and put real people doing real sports.

what did we get as cover of SI ? a freakin kardashian.

1905• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of this is related to the possible decline of mainstream sports? How many young 10 something year olds in this country really follow Baseball or Basketball? They seem to be more into gaming, among other things

graphe5• 2 years ago

For draft kings and other gambling ventures they get to know moneyball and five thirty eight.

lifeisstillgood• 2 years ago

Some slightly random thoughts

I have come to realise that Journalism is best seen as “data labelling” for the giant LLM we call “society”. Society has to have some data points it sees as truth and not truth.

Trade journalism seems the sensible level but honestly I Expect to see journalism in larger companies as management gets disaggregated - reporting on the politics and potentially going hand in hand with a rise in democratic workplaces

milkytron• 2 years ago

Idk about others, but I feel like journalism has gotten even better.

For instance, Jon Bois has some absolutely incredibly well researched videos on YouTube that go deep into the history of sports teams, and there are relevant and easy to consume graphics that go along with the story.

Just because print journalism struggles to compete and can't capture the majority of the sports media market like they used to, doesn't mean that journalism is collapsing.

hereme8883• 2 years ago

Seems strange that no one has mentioned how SI went the PC route and started adding obese female models.

Obviously that would drive men away. It's nature.

graphe5• 2 years ago

Has that ever had a positive impact or is it a death spiral? From what I understand heavier models is more in demand from younger viewers.

hereme8883• 2 years ago

From the responses I see in social media, people hate it.

I don't understand how younger people demand obese models. Is it a "loud pc minority" making that demand?

It's totally against the natural instinct and mating attractiveness of fit vs unfit. Especially teenagers who tend to be fitter than adults.

Sports Illustrated implosion shows the ugly, ongoing collapse of U.S. journalism

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