스포츠 사회학 페이퍼 - 스포츠 미디어

● Sport media expanding onto social media platforms with youth to get new fans (And then, SI!)

뉴욕타임스 스포츠부, 스포츠 일러스트레이티드의 사례 찾아보자!

 

참고 링크

- https://www.deseret.com/sports/2024/1/22/24045267/sports-illustrated-is-dying-here-is-why/

(좋은 글. 언론 관점에서)

Like thousands of others from the older crowd, I remember the excitement of finding Sports Illustrated in my mailbox every Thursday as a young boy. It was filled with glossy color photographs (a big deal then) and writing that was so good — witty, substantive, anecdotal — that nonsports readers enjoyed it.

Kenny Moore, Rick Reilly, Robert Creamer, Curry Kirkpatrick, Gary Smith, Dan Jenkins and William Nack were writers first, not sports fans, and sports offered them drama, adversity, triumph, defeat and all of society’s social issues on a brightly lit stage. As a young writer in college, I read the articles and underlined memorable sentences and paragraphs trying to determine how they made the stories come to life. I exchanged letters with their writers to understand how they did it. I was thrilled when I sold a story to the magazine early in my career.

New management took over the magazine several years ago. Venture capitalists (The Arena Group) swooped in and used the magazine’s great name to sell resorts and sports betting operations and other products that had nothing to do with journalism. It was like handing the Louvre to a circus.

I wish I could say I cared. I stopped reading the magazine long ago. It was a prolonged breakup. After I let my subscription lapse, the magazine continued to show up in my mailbox anyway. I lost interest because the writing grew stale and with the move to the internet, it grew worse. It became the equivalent of fast food, with bite-size tidbits and clickbait designed to attract readers with short attention spans (does anyone even read anymore?). There was no longer anything exceptional about it.

And still the decline continued. It was reported in November that Sports Illustrated was posting stories that were written by artificial intelligence with bylines for authors who don’t exist, including phony mug shots and bios of one “Drew Ortiz.” The bio read, “Drew has spent much of his life outdoors … Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”

The demise of an old friend — how Sports Illustrated fell apart

 

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcuscollins/2024/03/25/sports-illustrateds-decline-reveals-the-impact-of-cultural-change/?sh=4bc448d9a594

(좋은 글. 문화 관점에서)

Sports Illustrated was once the standard bearer for sports journalism. Before there was SportsCenter, OverTime, or Bleacher Report, there was SI—the Time, Inc. publication with millions of readers in circulation and shelves full of journalism awards over the decades.

Since its launch in 1954, Sports Illustrated created and cornered a market for sports journalism that went deeper into sports than traditional media outlets. The publication initially focused its efforts on covering premier sporting events, telling the stories behind the stories that didn't make the television broadcast or weren't captured in newspaper copy.

With SI's in-depth journalism and exceptional photography, the publisher created a lane for itself and set the bar for other outlets to follow.

However, changes in the media landscape shifted how people consumed content and also how they engaged with it—especially in sports. The social web provided sports fans extensive access to sports content and a means to facilitate discourse between other fans.

Before long, it was not enough for fans to merely stand by and consume the content; they wanted to contribute to the creation, contextualization and contortion of the content through memes, hashtags, debates and conspiracy theories.

Whether your audience is as big as Kai Cenat or more communal like the Instagram sports commentary of TBT Talks, the metatext draws people into sports—even if they're only "here for the comments." This requires contemporary journalism to shift from merely reporting sports news to igniting the discourse that excites the metatext among sports fans.

The world of sports journalism has changed because sports itself has changed. What happens off the court is just as culturally significant and engaging as what happens when the clock is running. The metatext reimagines fan engagement.

This enables a league like the NBA the opportunity to extend its season from six months of gameplay to a 12-month affair, where fans and contemporary journalists alike engage in the metatext even during the offseason. This cultural shift means big business for brands that understand it and trouble for those that don't.

Who knows what the future of the sports icon will be? But one thing's for sure: It will depend on its willingness to embrace culture.

And that's the tricky part: Culture is constantly changing. It's always moving forward, and you have to change with it—or risk being left behind.

With every new idea, product release, or post content, the public engages in a meaning-making process to decide whether it is "cool" or "lame" and whether it's "in" or "out," based on the cultural conventions of the day.

How Sports Illustrated's Failure To Adapt Led To Its Decline

- https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman-/sports-illustrateds-epic-brand-failure.html

(산업 관점에서)

SI reached its peak circulation about 30 years ago and things have been headed downhill ever since. From weekly to monthly to nowhere.

If the cover of Rolling Stone was the golden ring for artists and bands in the rock business, then Sports Illustrated was the biblical equivalent for jocks in every sport.  And, truthfully, SI's powerful brand, slick photography, great writing, and its broad demographic reach was even more substantial than Jann Wenner's rag. 

Sports Illustrated may only be the latest casualty in a long list of brands and businesses overtaken by change and new technologies, which includes Kodak, Blackberry, AAA, and the entire Swiss watch industry. But it won't be the last. Time is ruthless. The message is clear: if you're not actively moving your business forward, you're losing ground and slipping backwards - whether you know it or not. As long as you act as if you're coming from behind, you have a shot at staying ahead.

- https://awfulannouncing.com/si/sports-illustrated-ai-controversy-sports-journalism.html

The long, sad decline of Sports Illustrated

(AI 관점에서)

As a 90s child growing up on Dunkaroos and Nickelodeon, racing to the mailbox each Thursday for the new issue of Sports Illustrated became a rite of passage, opening my eyes to a colorful new world mythologizing the likes of Michael Jordan and Mark McGwire, larger-than-life athletes that informed my perception of sports and celebrity at a young age. As an eight and nine-year-old binging Rick Reilly’s back-page column, it felt like I had finally graduated from the kid’s table, passing my initiation and earning membership into a secret society of learned scholars preserving the sanctity of sports journalism.

Needless to say, the threat of AI is not going away any time soon, with Sports Illustrated and other early adopters setting a dangerous precedent, passing off computer-generated stories as manmade and expecting readers not to notice.

 

 

 

[NY Times 스포츠 데스크 해체, '디 애슬레틱'에게 위임]

 

The decision impacts more than 35 people in the sports department, according to The New York Times. Journalists on the sports desk will move to other roles within the newsroom and no layoffs are planned.

“Though we know this decision will be disappointing to some, we believe it is the right one for readers and will allow us to maximize the respective strengths of The Times’s and The Athletic’s newsrooms,” New York Times Co. Chairman A.G. Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien wrote Monday in a letter to staff.

The shift in philosophy "will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues," according to the email, and focus "even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large."

The New York Times Company acquired The Athletic, a subscription-based sports journalism site, in January 2022 for $550 million. At the time of the sale, CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said The Athletic would continue to exist as a "stand-alone product."

The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.

The acquisition of The Athletic had raised questions about the future of The Times’s sports department, which has included numerous distinguished journalists. The Sports of The Times column was started by John Kieran in 1927, and would later include a distinguished group of writers, including Robert Lipsyte, William Rhoden, Harvey Araton, Selena Roberts, George Vecsey and Ira Berkow.

Three Sports of The Times columnists, Arthur Daley, Red Smith and Dave Anderson, have won Pulitzer Prizes for their sports writing. Another sports reporter, John Branch, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his feature on a deadly avalanche in Washington State, and Josh Haner won the feature photography prize in 2014 for documenting the recovery of a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.

In recent years, with the rise of digital media, The Times’s sports department began to downsize, just as many other national and local newspapers did. The section lost its stand-alone daily print section. Not every local team was assigned a beat reporter. Box scores disappeared.

In an email to the company on Monday, Mr. Sulzberger and Meredith Kopit Levien, The Times’s chief executive, wrote, “Though we know this decision will be disappointing to some, we believe it is the right one for readers.”