AI killing SI

It was she who oversaw the “advance text” portion of the mag, stories that mostly ran only in subscriber issues (versus newsstand), and only then for subscribers in affluent zip codes.

WTF??

Time persists.

marty

It was she who oversaw the “advance text” portion of the mag, stories that mostly ran only in subscriber issues (versus newsstand), and only then for subscribers in affluent zip codes.

WTF??

Time persists.

I’m old enough to remember when SI had wonderfully written articles - my all time favorite, Poison Ivy in the Ivy League. In more recent years, I’d skim through back issues at my doctors’ offices, but since COVID, no more magazines there. Soon I might have to join other waiting patients and stare at my smart phone.

BTW, our heavyweight crew made the cover in, I think, 1957, several years before Cornell became even a gleam in my eye. I have a vague memory of Ed Marinaro making the SI cover as well.

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George64
BTW, our heavyweight crew made the cover in, I think, 1957, several years before Cornell became even a gleam in my eye. I have a vague memory of Ed Marinaro making the SI cover as well.

Al, thanks for the SI cover information. The 1962 crew! I was at Cornell then, I should have remembered!

SI was single-handedly responsible for keeping snooty Ivy sports in front of 99.7% of an audience that didn't care in the 50s and 60s. God bless them for that, unironically. Somewhere George Plimpton sadly sips his sloe gin fizz and unenthusiastically pulls the maid.

John Walters' piece on the further demise of Sports Illustrated has the undercurrent of "Who? Me? Laid off? My magazine is losing ground? But I went to Yale!" It happens when the staff of magazines regarded as the best -- by National Magazine Awards, by circulation, by ad pages, by revenues, by the percentage of staff from the Ivies / Seven Sisters / Little Three -- lose their traction, their subscribers and their ad revenues. It happened in parallel to reporters and editors of the NY Times, WSJ and those who worked elsewhere but won Pulitzers. No empire lasts forever. Dick Brass '73 of the Cornell Daily Sun had a bet with one of the New York Times family that the Times would be out of the print business by 2020 because of decreased print advertising; it hasn't happened yet but it may well. Other than the WSJ and Times, the marquee newspapers are dangling, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune.

With magazines if not newspapers, editors and reporters often traveled first class by plane and in hotels. Twenty years ago executive editors at top women's magazines were making on the high side of a quarter-million dollars. All that is over now, except maybe for the editor in chief. And it's crushing to suffer that fall from grace that you've become accustomed to. But, hey, there's always tech startups and now AI startups. Every generation of smart college students needs to find different horses to ride on.

There is the The Athletic, which has replaced the the NYT sports department -- no problem for me, I found the NYT sports section if not the writers pretty stuffy. It is annoying that if you subscribe to the NYT online edition, you get ony the first paragraphs of an Athletic stories.

This is written by someone who saw his newspaper newsroom drop from 150 in the 1970s to about 15, had two magazines end their print runs (one, PCMag, was the biggest business magazine of the 1990s) and a third fold entirely. I thought I'm a jinx. But it happens to a lot of people and pubs. Several Sun reporters/editors with Pulitzers have laid off or bought out. Now it's happening to SI (where some Cornell alums worked), but it really headed downhill starting a decade ago, with fewer reporters and editors, the firing of all on-staff photographers, the sale of Time Inc to Meredith, and this year reports that some SI stories were AI-generated.

Bill, I thought you would comment but really wondered if you have ever heard of this:

It was she who oversaw the “advance text” portion of the mag, stories that mostly ran only in subscriber issues (versus newsstand), and only then for subscribers in affluent zip codes.

marty
Bill, I thought you would comment but really wondered if you have ever heard of this:

It was she who oversaw the “advance text” portion of the mag, stories that mostly ran only in subscriber issues (versus newsstand), and only then for subscribers in affluent zip codes.

In addition to regional editions (1-2 pages that are different for NYC, NJ, CT, NYS outside NYC), publications target more affluent customers. For a NYC area paper, there might be extra pages inserted with additional stories and ads (a 12-page section might insert a single sheet, 2 pages, after page C6 and mark it as page C6a and C6b). It would go to Somerset and Hunterdon Counties in NJ, or coastal Connecticut plus Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The Fashions of the Times magazine might go to all or most all readers because it raises the visibility and lust factor for a Gucci or Hermes bag among people who can't afford them.

For magazines special editorial content might be for areas of affinity (golf, tennis) or affluent zip codes across the country: Palm Beach but not the Villages in Florida. SI had among other things a Golf section that went to readers who expressed interest. One of the writers was Rick Lipsey '89, Cornell's lead golfer then and for a time the a golf pro in Bhutan.

Generally the special or extra sections targeted things that people might spend money on, not stories that told you more about poor people in eastern Europe. Ziff-Davis, where I spent most of my adult life, grew as a special interest publisher with magazines about flying, golf, tennis, cars, and then PC Magazine. Bill Ziff noted there was no Swimming Magazine because about all you could buy was swimsuits and goggles. Golf, tennis and boats, that was a different matter.

The web is even better because you qualify yourself every time you click on a story about travel to Galapagos, treatments for hair loss, or investing.

Thanks, Bill.

I remember Ziff Davis mostly for double billing me for a magazine and then threatening collection (IIRC). I do remember that the only way a poor guy like me living in suburban Chicago could get their attention was to write a complaint to the NYS AG (Louis Lefkowitz?). Suddenly I was no longer invisible and was treated like a VIP.

marty
I remember Ziff Davis mostly for double billing me for a magazine and then threatening collection (IIRC). I do remember that the only way a poor guy like me living in suburban Chicago could get their attention was to write a complaint to the NYS AG (Louis Lefkowitz?). Suddenly I was no longer invisible and was treated like a VIP.

Geez, why didn't you call me? I would have taken care of it for you. I could recite for you the name of the head of circulation and his or her email address. If I met you at a user group or on the plane, I usually just took your info and sent the circ director a note; it got cleared up. I hatched the idea of making PCMag one of the first magazines, early 1990s, to publish the phone numbers or email addresses of staff so readers could interact. Our staff did not like the idea of actually being accessible to the readers they served. Contact info on the masthead page lasted about six months, got dropped, then came back in the 2000s when everyone did it as times changed.

We did good at both subscriber newsstand circulation. As you probably learned, you get your renewal notice 3 months after you renewed your subscription. It maximized re-ups since the letters somehow, ahem, didn't mention the renewal date was 9 or 6 months off. #FOMO and all. We also were pretty good at getting great newsstand display for single-issue sales. The job of overseeing it called for the ability to talk dese-dem-dose English with distributors and also manage the numbers. The in-house joke was the only guy better than our existing newstand director would be a guy named – this was the nineties, okay? – Guido Markowitz.

The problem with having your best years in business in your 30s and 40s, like an athlete only time-shifted by a decade, is that once that fades, all you've got left is telling people how good the good old days were. And nobody else much cares. If someone from the 1920s-1930s told us in the 1970s-1980s how the Cornell Daily Sun did things back in the era of raccoon coats, I'd write them off, and yet now we feel entitled to use "Ned" and "Ken" for people whose Cornellian parents came after the early hockey heroes.

I vaguely remember opting in to the extra golf content when I had an SI subscription in the 90s. Not because I really cared about golf but because i just liked the idea of getting more for my money.

Exactly: took the golf supplement. Me too. I've played maybe 3 dozen rounds of golf, lifetime, so why not read more about it. Because you checked a box, it could be said you opted in or were a qualified and interested reader, which shows value to the advertiser.

Every pub wants highly qualified readers. Especially the ones with money: I love the WSJ fashions for men (and women). A man's winter parka, there may be three featured: $2,000, $1,000, and the $695 bargain choice. I could not write that with a straight face.

As SI cuts back, it less of a high-end magazine. No more George Plimpton.

billhoward

Every pub wants highly qualified readers. Especially the ones with money: I love the WSJ fashions for men (and women). A man's winter parka, there may be three featured: $2,000, $1,000, and the $695 bargain choice. I could not write that with a straight face.

As SI cuts back, it less of a high-end magazine. No more George Plimpton.

Since I wouldn't mind wearing George's clothes I'd like to know where the hell all the high end clothes go when they don't sell. Many brands agreed to end the destruction of their left over merchandise, yet I'm clueless as to where the close out racks are found.

Maybe in the favelas people are starving in style.

Wow! I thought I was good at thread-drift. There is competition and that improves the breed. Thank you for keeping me on my toes.

The high-end clothes if they can't or shouldn't be burned, could be shredded. They aren't produced in quantities like Zara. They aren't quirks that were done up in advance for the team that wound up losing the Super Bowl. So it's manageable. But if you send the clothes offshore for deconstruction and re-use, you know some of it's going to get diverted. Those people who run the places are thieves. Albeit no match for Wall Street or the sports books advertised on TV. Maybe the clothes could be burned to provide heat for refugees in a war-torn region. Do good even while advancing global warming.

billhoward
Wow! I thought I was good at thread-drift. There is competition and that improves the breed. Thank you for keeping me on my toes.

The high-end clothes if they can't or shouldn't be burned, could be shredded. They aren't produced in quantities like Zara. They aren't quirks that were done up in advance for the team that wound up losing the Super Bowl. So it's manageable. But if you send the clothes offshore for deconstruction and re-use, you know some of it's going to get diverted. Those people who run the places are thieves. Albeit no match for Wall Street or the sports books advertised on TV. Maybe the clothes could be burned to provide heat for refugees in a war-torn region. Do good even while advancing global warming.

Visiting Cape Cod many years ago I found a Boston College NCAA 2000 hockey championship hat. I couldn't bring myself to buy it but bought a Troy State hat which I wore around town (with a good one-liner to go with it).

One of the Coach bag outs apparently concerned agreeing not to destroy returned items. But returned and unsold could be different animals and whether leather or "vegan leather" who's watching the cattle?

billhoward
Wow! I thought I was good at thread-drift. There is competition and that improves the breed. Thank you for keeping me on my toes.

The high-end clothes if they can't or shouldn't be burned, could be shredded. They aren't produced in quantities like Zara. They aren't quirks that were done up in advance for the team that wound up losing the Super Bowl. So it's manageable. But if you send the clothes offshore for deconstruction and re-use, you know some of it's going to get diverted. Those people who run the places are thieves. Albeit no match for Wall Street or the sports books advertised on TV. Maybe the clothes could be burned to provide heat for refugees in a war-torn region. Do good even while advancing global warming.

Hee hee.

Go Birds!