The demise of Sports Illustrated is worth noting

It’s stunning to compare journalism today to the media organizations that were thriving a couple of decades ago.

Cheryl Tiegs was not available.

I read where Sports Illustrated has laid off its entire staff, which probably means the best sports magazine in the world (for many decades) will soon be most sincerely dead.

In one sense, the death of this once-venerable magazine was self-inflicted (“Go Woke, Go Broke”), but economic and societal trends the editors couldn’t control also played a role in said death. 

In my opinion, the death/near-death of once revered publications like Sports Illustrated (SI) also tells us a great deal about the state of the “real economy.” (UPDATE: The newsroom carnage has just stuck, again, at The L.A. Times).

In reflecting on the passing of SI, I started thinking about all the other magazines and newspapers I grew up reading that are now long-deceased or are clinging to life only because of the generosity of Big Pharma and Bill Gates’ “excellence-in-journalism” subsidies.

For today’s column, I decided to take a trip down memory lane which depicts the “then- and-now” of journalism.

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Sports Illustrated (SI) - From the time I was a little, avid sports fan, my father, two brothers and I read Sports Illustrated every week. Alas, slowly - and then suddenly - people, in droves, quit reading SI.

Discerning journalism observers knew the magazine had jumped the shark and been infected by fatal wokeness when its new owners used its famous swimsuit edition to profile, ah, heftier swimsuit models and even transgender swimsuit models.

Today, my thought is that if a magazine as excellent as SI once was can no longer make a profit (covering sports), there’s not many magazines that are going to survive.

Newsweek - for all practical purposes, Newsweek bit the dust at least a decade ago. For most of its existence, Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post Company which, if my memory is correct, sold the magazine for $1 (!) under the stipulation the new owners took on its massive debt.

I didn’t agree with everything Newsweek’s journalists’ wrote, but I thought its coverage was, for the most part, “middle of the road” and provided some “balance.”

The magazine never had the subscriber base of its more-liberal competitor Time, but it was still read by tens of millions of people. For a while, I thought the magazine was completely dead, but it’s still publishing (although my Substack might have more readers today).

Now for Newspapers …

I used to be one of those news and current-events junkies who read multiple newspapers every day. Here are the main newspapers I grew up reading, starting with the big state newspapers in Alabama

The Birmingham News was the biggest and best newspaper in Alabama. If I remember, its Sunday paid circulation was always over 200,000. The Sunday edition often included more than 100 pages.

I later started a weekly newspaper in my hometown. Before I did this, I studied the percentages of “paid advertising” in each newspaper. Most papers like The Birmingham News were approximately 60 percent advertising and 40 percent “news” or editorial content.

Today, when I look at a print newspaper (when I can find one), I note that the percentage of paid ads in a sample edition is maybe 10 percent. Instead of 48 or 60 pages, the edition might be 16 to 24 pages …. and the pages are much smaller (yes, “shrinkflation” literally shrunk the size of newspaper pages.)

At one time, The Birmingham News probably employed 100 salaried journalists, editors and photographers. Its full-time sports staff was much larger than the full editorial staffs at most newspapers today.

About 15 or 20 years ago, the owners of The Birmingham News sold out to an outfit that created the Internet website al.com. 

This monster (Advance Local Media LLC) gobbled up newspapers all over the country and, to me, specializes in killing real newspapers. The company’s main goal seems to be to shut down print newspapers and then make sure the few reporters they retain only promote the authorized narrative.

This vampire media company acquired The Birmingham News, Mobile Press Register and The Huntsville Times, all of which are now dead and gone and no longer publish print editions.

In 1983, when I graduated from high school, these three papers probably employed at least 250 full-time editors and journalists. Today, al.com might employ 25 full-time “journalists.”

The Montgomery Advertiser was the biggest newspaper in central Alabama. The Sunday circulation of The Advertiser was also probably over 200,000. 

Per my memory, The Advertiser never published an edition with fewer than 36 pages. I’d guess half of the middle-class families in Troy, Alabama (40 miles south of Montgomery) subscribed to The Advertiser.

Today, I don’t know anyone in my town who subscribes to The Advertiser. If they get it, they get it in the mail. (Once upon a time, I knew several people who made extra spending money via Montgomery Advertiser paper routes. Those jobs are also gone with the wind.)

A colleague who used to be a sports writer for The Advertiser recently told me that the Advertiser’s print run is now less than 7,000! (My Substack newsletter almost has as many subscribers as people who get a print edition of The Advertiser). 

Every convenience store and grocery store in Pike County used to have Montgomery Advertiser racks. Now, I’m not sure there’s one Advertiser newspaper rack in our entire county.

The last few times I picked up a Montgomery Advertiser, the paper was 12 (significantly shrunk) pages. It might have had four or five display ads in the entire edition.

I don’t know how many full-time news and sports reporters The Advertiser now employs, but it can’t be more than a handful. 

A couple of months ago, I ran a story about a sister Gannet-owned newspaper (The Lafayette, Louisiana Daily Advertiser) that had ONE salaried news writer! (Gannett, which has now merged with GateHouse, also specializes in killing once-proud and important newspapers). 

Speaking of Gannett, I used to buy its flagship publication, USA Today, almost every day. This national paper has also shrunk to about 16 to 20 pages with few ads. Those racks that used to be at every store in the country must be at the bottom of many landfills today.

The Troy Messenger - This is my hometown newspaper, which, thankfully, is still publishing today. In fact, my younger brother is the publisher. (I got my brother into the newspaper business when we started a weekly, The Troy Citizen, in 1997. I raised the white flag on that business, which almost killed me, about eight years later.) 

For more than 120 years, The Messenger published a print edition five days a week. Today, it’s down to two days a week.

My first newspaper job - in 1989 - was as sports editor of my hometown newspaper. Back then, The Messenger had a staff of at least 15 people, including at least six journalists or editors and two or three advertising sales reps. Today, The Messenger has five full-time employees (counting the publisher, my brother).

Most editions are eight pages. For what it’s worth, I use to write at least 20 local sports stories and columns for this newspaper every week. Today, The Messenger’s editorial staff of two or three people might publish 10 bylined stories - sports and news - the entire week.

Still, I’m thankful our town still has a newspaper, which is doing the best it can. For all my criticism of sorry journalism, I still believe journalism is vital to any community. 

Someone needs to cover school boards and city council meetings. It’s nice if your kids’ school or Little League activities get a little coverage (if for no other reason than to give mothers clippings to put in their children’s memory scrapbooks).

The morning newspapers are all gone …

Readers under, say, age 45 might not believe this, but most larger cities in America used to have at least two daily newspapers. This provided healthy competition in the news business and made sure journalists were competing for scoops.

Until my early 20s, I routinely read The Birmingham Post Herald and The Alabama Journal based in Montgomery. They’re both long gone.

The Post Herald probably survived a few extra years because this paper employed famous/infamous sports columnist Paul Finebaum. People would buy The Post Herald just to read Finebaum’s column. Finebaum must have read the writing on the wall and segued into sports talk radio and is now a multi-millionaire for Disney and ESPN via his popular show on The SEC Network.

A few conclusions from the above trends  …

* Daily newspapers are already dead … or soon will be.

* In Alabama, the number of salaried full-time journalists working at our state’s newspapers must have plunged by at least 85 percent in the last four decades. 

Indeed, this makes one wonder how colleges can continue to justify offering majors in journalism … as the graduates of these academic program are going to be competing for, say, 100 (low-paying) jobs in the entire state.

* Most of this jaw-dropping attrition is probably explained by the fact publishers made the brilliant (sarc) decision to give away their product - journalism content - for free on the Internet. (Of course, I can’t talk. I’m doing the same thing with my Substack).

* The rest of this death story is explained by the fact publishers quit covering real news and essentially became stenographers for the Powers that Be. 

* A glance at the few businesses still paying for advertising in newspapers or magazines should have told journalists on the “economics beat” that the real state of the economy is not nearly as robust as they’ve been telling readers.

One simply has to listen to the radio or watch TV commercials to see who is - and who isn’t - advertising these days. Big Pharma and plaintiff trial lawyers are about the only consistent big advertisers (along with government public health agencies pushing vaccines).

What you don’t see is many of the locally-owned “Mom and Pop” type businesses advertising like they used to. The reason for this is those businesses have been decimated by big mega companies and macro economic trends.

* Also, the easiest inflation work-around for businesses trying to survive is to cut back on - or completely cancel - paid advertising. 

* For consumers, one of the easiest inflation work-arounds is to cut back on - or completely cancel - paid subscriptions.

How all of the above affected yours truly …

The reason I became a freelance journalist is my position as managing editor at a weekly in Montgomery was eliminated by a publisher who needed to slash expenses.

I then became a contrarian “investigative journalist” who wanted to specialize in the type stories the mainstream publications wouldn’t cover. As it turns out - to save money - nobody’s paying freelance journalists any more, especially journalists who write the taboo stories that interest me.

Looking back on my life, I guess one might say I picked the wrong profession at the wrong period of U.S. history.

Or one might say what I’m trying to do is more important than ever - given the clone-thinking in the establishment press.

Substack turned out to be the “work-around” for independent journalists like myself. In fact, Substack and a few popular alternative media sites have proven that tremendous demand still exists for real journalism. 

The challenge comes from the true state of the economy and the fact so many news consumers are cutting back on paid subscriptions … or people can only support so many of their favorite writers.

In a nutshell, the death of real journalism is a big and important story. It’s a shame we have so few journalists willing to tell this story.