There are many questions about if Arena Group will have a continued role with Sports Illustrated following SI owner Authentic Brands Group pulling their publishing license last month. And there are also many questions about the overall future of SI. But despite that license revocation, an executive at Arena Group has reportedly made a major impact on one of the SI print editions still to come out under that license.
Ben Strauss of The Washington Post reported Thursday that Arena executive Orestes Baez (whose LinkedIn profile lists him as the CEO of the Arena-owned TravelHost Network) specifically intervened in SI editorial operations. As per Strauss’ piece there, Baez acted to remove a Chris Mannix story on transgender athletes in boxing from an upcoming version of the magazine. Neither Mannix nor Baez commented to Strauss, but he did get some on-the-record comments from “a spokesperson for Baez”:
The story, reported and written by Chris Mannix, was intended to be part of the March edition of the magazine that hits newsstands at the end of February. But on Wednesday, just days before the issue was scheduled to be printed, Orestes Baez, an Arena Group executive, told top editors not to include it. Multiple Sports Illustrated staffers said they had never seen a story removed in such a manner.
A spokesman for Baez, Steve Janisse, said that the story was removed from the print magazine because it was no longer newsy, and the outlet was still planning to publish the story online. Sports Illustrated publishes its regular issues once a month and usually has a lead time of several weeks before printing.
“The story was not pulled,” Janisse said. “I’m sure it may not be normal, but as you can imagine, Orestes is new to that team, and there’s a lot of changes in the newsroom. I think they’re trying to figure out their roles and new places.”
…Baez is serving as the de facto general manager of Sports Illustrated after several executives at the Arena Group were fired in recent weeks by the largest shareholder of the company, 5-Hour energy founder Manoj Bhargava.
…Steve Cannella, the editor in chief of Sports Illustrated, referred questions Thursday to Arena. Mannix did not reply to a text message. Baez did not reply to an email.
The “no longer newsy” argument here simply does not fly. And a business-side executive from Arena Group is not the person who should be making that call even if there was actual logic to it. But the publication process for SI’s print issue, and the need to make the stories that appear in it evergreen, has been well-established on the editorial side before this. That really started with their cuts to 27 print issues for 2018 (under Meredith ownership, before the 2019 sale to Authentic).
And the once-a-month schedule beginning in 2020 led to significant editorial changes in terms of focus on evergreen stories there. And both Cannella and Mannix have previously spoken to AA on that, and how that schedule altered the editorial focus for the print magazine. (The Mannix interview there is a good read in terms of him laying out how they were able to change a Celtics cover later than normal thanks to the Ime Udoka suspension, with him laying out both how difficult that was but also how the magazine was still doing its utmost to remain timely despite closing dates.)
So the key editorial-side figures in this story have long publicly discussed their awareness of the challenges the monthly issues bring. And they’ve repeatedly spoken on how focus on making their print content as evergreen as possible. So it’s utterly absurd to think that an Arena Group executive newly appointed to oversee SI, whose most recent past experience is with TravelHost (Baez’s LinkedIn cites his roles before that as publishing local newspaper groups in multiple states, including Wisconsin and Michigan), has a better sense of what’s “newsy” for a print version of SI than writers and editors who have long been laboring under the publication’s current print publishing deadline constraints.
From an ethics standpoint, a business-side executive should ideally not be making a call on that front under any circumstances. There’s a reason editorial and publishing roles are separated. But this particular decision (at least, as reported by Strauss) seems even more sketchy than normal. And the “not pulled” comment here is also debatable. Yes, the publication may still run this story online (that will deserve close watching), but we’ll see what version of it is run. But this was indisputably pulled from the print magazine, which does still have a reach that extends beyond the digital site’s reach in some ways. (More people can read any particular story on the SI website, but inclusion of a story in print puts it in front of people who might never come across it online.)
As per the story itself, we won’t know what it is until it runs. But Strauss describes it as discussing USA Boxing’s new transgender policy (announced late in December) that requires genital-reassignment surgery and stringent hormone testing for transgender athletes before competition, and featuring comment from “both advocates of transgender participation in the sport and those opposed to it.”
On the surface, that seems like a fair treatment. And it seems like something SI should be covering. As Strauss’ piece notes, they’ve previously had several notable stories on transgender athletes in sports, including a profile of swimmer Lia Thomas by Robert Sanchez and multiple stories from former staffer Julie Kliegman. So that’s led to backlash from current staffers on this move. And while they may still run a version of this online, this move by Baez means many print magazine subscribers may never come across the piece.
Something that perhaps gets lost in some of the nostalgia for the past days of SI from the likes of Rick Reilly and Peter King (people who haven’t worked there since 2008 and 2018 respectively) is the amount of quality journalism still being done at the magazine. While there have unquestionably been incredible challenges there over the last seven years around a succession of owners from Time Inc. through Meredith through Authentic, many of those who still remain at SI have still been producing remarkable and notable work, including long-established writers like Mannix. And this piece may well have been that before it was reportedly buried by an Arena executive who does not appear to have relevant sports editorial experience.
Yes, stories on transgender athletes are often controversial. And they have been for quite a while at this point. But nothing in this story, at least as per Strauss’ description, sounds particularly objectionable, with both critics and supporters of those athletes platformed. And it’s wild that a business-side executive from Arena would override the established SI editorial process here.
As noted at the top of this piece, it’s far from clear if Arena has any future with SI. Authentic revoked Arena’s license on Jan. 19, with that coming amidst Arena refusing to pay the agreed-upon licensing fee. But Authentic has insisted the publication will “not go dark,” and they’ve been in reported talks with both Arena and others.
And the license revocation clearly was not completely “this is gone right now.” And that’s illustrated by how some SI staffers received 90-day termination notices rather than instant (and how some managers reportedly have not received termination notices at all, part of the union complaint here), and by how the print issues here were still progressing. But amidst that giant amount of uncertainty, it’s even more remarkable than normal that an Arena Group business-side staffer would interfere in an editorial decision like this, and it’s not a great look for an already-under-fire brand.
