The Fall of Sports Illustrated

SI, my employer from 1984 to 2017, now stands accused of publishing AI-generated product reviews under the bylines and thumbnail biographies of nonexistent writers.

The higher-ups don’t care about quality. They haven’t for a long time.

That assessment was shared with me by a former SI staffer, who requested anonymity to preserve professional relationships. The Arena Group management, he told me, doesn’t value journalism; what it does value is “the power of the brand” as something it can attach to “shower curtains, brain pills, a sports book in Ann Arbor, some restaurant in Canada.”

But our stoicism was pierced by this latest, AI-related abomination now attached to a once-great magazine. I know it gets old, hearing Boomers like me repeat it, but SI was Valhalla not just for sportswriters but for writers, period. Through the decades, the magazine’s editors persuaded such authors as William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter Thompson to contribute stories. I wasn’t quite a year out of college when I first arrived at SI’s 20th-floor offices in the Time & Life Building, across the Avenue of the Americas from Radio City Music Hall. As an English major at Colgate, I’d spent four years with my nose in various Norton anthologies. It didn’t seem like that much of a drop-off from the names in those texts to the senior writers on SI’s masthead.

The Fall of Sports Illustrated

This is ​something that may sicken Steve. He has written fairly often about what a great mag it was 50 years ago when it featured sporting tales by some of the best writers in the English language world. That died a long time ago but the ignoble end has been worse than imagined now.

Pat Ryan was central to the good stuff.

More blog references.

On the plus side, there are some great articles in the archives if you can find them.