The print magazine market is a fraction of what it was. Advertising and circulation revenue is now insufficient to run a national publication, because there are certain fixed costs you simply have to meet. The Sports Illustrated decline breaks my heart. I subscribed for the first time when I was about 8 years old. I didn’t understand all the sports that SI covered (I was mostly a baseball fan back then) but even if I wasn’t familiar with a sport, the writing was so good and the photography was out of this world. For decades, everybody who was anybody in sports journalism wanted to write for SI and have their photos featured. I think the decline is more a reflection of the impact of electronic media on journalism in general and sports journalism more specifically. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to see the next week’s SI to see if my teams were mentioned or, better yet, had a feature article about them. Most games were NOT on TV and often our local paper didn’t provide much more than a couple of paragraphs from one of the wire services. In depth coverage came from SI. Now, every game is on TV. You can just hop on the internet and get coverage of any team and any sport on a daily (or often hourly) basis. There certainly is no need to wait an entire week to see what SI has to say about it.
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