At the start of 2024, there were regular headlines about the latest disastrous news at Sports Illustrated. That particularly came around publishing license holder Arena Group’s January move to lay off more than 100 employees, which came around SI owner Authentic Brands Group revoking Arena’s license to publish SI.
But, after that revocation and announced layoffs, that license eventually passed to Minute Media in March. And while the transition was remarkably bumpy, the magazine and its website have appeared to be on much firmer ground since then. And SI senior writer Chris Mannix, a long-time stalwart there, confirmed on the latest Awful Announcing podcast that that shift has been seen internally as well, telling podcast host Brandon Contes that Minute’s takeover of the publishing license has brought back stability to SI.
“Things have changed dramatically in an incredibly positive way,” Mannix said. “We began the year with most of us wondering if we would have jobs. When they announced that elimination back in January, everyone was kind of scrambling and wondering how it was all gonna shake out. To the credit of Minute Media and ABG, which is our real owner, they have figured out a solution here.”
Mannix said Minute’s publishing plan has been a better fit with SI’s history and traditions.
“Early on in the Arena Group days, the emphasis was on churn, right? It was like, let’s get, you know, five or six whatever stories out every single week. You still have to produce at this version of SI: you’re still writing columns for the web, you’re still podcasting, you’re still doing a whole bunch of different stuff. But there’s a lot more emphasis on quality as opposed to quantity.”
He said that includes giving writers the time they need to do a good job with top stories, such as his own recent one on Adrian Wojnarowski’s pivot from reporting for ESPN to working for a college basketball team.
“I think if you’re trying to keep a magazine alive and you’re trying to write stories, like the one I did on Woj and many others that some of my talented colleagues have done in recent months, you can’t just sit down and write that thing in a couple of hours, right? It takes time to report it out, it takes time to write it. And Minute Media and this ownership group have given me and other writers a lot of room to breathe when it comes to stuff like this. So I can tell you the entire staff is wildly optimistic about the future of this place because of what Minute Media has done coming in.”
Contes asked Mannix if he’d explored other options around the January news of SI’s apparent demise. Mannix confirmed he’d fielded some approaches, but didn’t explore them too heavily because of his belief SI would survive.
“I had some. My agent talked to me about a couple of other different opportunities. But there was a long runway before SI was gonna be, quote, “eliminated” and the staff was going to be laid off. I think it was all the way into April. So we had, like, three months.”
He said part of his belief there came from SI’s ownership structure, with ABG owning them primarily for licensing rights elsewhere, but needing a solid publishing partner to make those other rights work.
“Maybe I was being naive, pie in the sky. But at that time, I just kept thinking ‘There’s no way someone’s going to let SI die.’ That just wasn’t going to happen. And part of it was blind optimism, but also part of it was we had an owner in ABG that licenses out our intellectual property. It would only hurt them if SI went away, if the staff was gutted and tossed aside.”
Mannix said his belief wound up more than justified by the eventual deal ABG struck with Minute.
“I just had some optimism that something was going to happen, someone was going to come along and figure this thing out,” he said. “It worked out better than I, and most, probably ever would have dreamed, having an owner that came in and brought back, I think, 90 percent of the staff, and made the commitment with resources, like Minute Media has done.”
But he said he was confident SI would survive given the publication’s history and legacy.
“I didn’t panic all that much in in the first couple of months, because I just believed that something was going to change. This idea of just eliminating the magazine and cutting all the staff, I know it’s happened in other places and it’s terrible, but I just didn’t believe that that at this point in time it could happen at SI.”
[Awful Announcing on YouTube]