End of an Era - Sports Illustrated, VICE, Product Reviews, and Instagram
Sports Illustrated
Last month, most of the staff at Sports Illustrated were notified they would be laid off, due to a dispute between Authentic Brands Group, which owns Sports Illustrated and Arena Group, who were responsible for publishing its magazine.
These are strange words to write, because while we're familiar with corporate conglomerates controlling media properties - i.e. Conde Nast - it is a feature of the last decade's relentless financialization that Sports Illustrated is now, effectively, a brand that dabbles in magazine publishing. The value of the name - accrued over decades of sports journalism - has become divorced from sports journalism.
We know this because weeks after it laid off its writing staff, Authentic Brands threw a multi-million dollar Sports Illustrated Super Bowl party in Vegas:
“This is Sports Illustrated, the party!” the DJ yelled. “Tonight is going to be legendary.”
[...]
Inside, green and gold strobe lights flashed on the dance floor. The price for a table reached into the six figures. The Chainsmokers — it’s always the Chainsmokers, isn’t it? — provided the soundtrack.
As SI's writers debated where to seek employment, Authentic Brands was collecting millions from media orgs and celebrities to pop bottles with A-List celebs on the red carpet.
Nor was it the only party Authentic threw that weekend - it owns the 'rights' to Rob Gronkowski, Shaq, and Guy Fieri as well. But flogging SI's brand after it had gutted the publication feels particularly cruel. One of the CEO's deputies estimated the party made Authentic 'several million dollars.'
In fact, Authentic has made back its initial investment in SI and then some:
The company paid around $90 million in cash for SI, which had already undergone several rounds of layoffs and was struggling with the digital transition across media. Authentic has recouped all of that payment through licensing deals, [Dan] Dienst said, including earning tens of millions of dollars from the media company that pays Authentic to publish SI in print and online. The licensing side of the SI business, Dienst said, now accounts for more revenue than the media side and makes up around 5 percent of Authentic’s total business.
Which sounds great for Authentic, and would be great for the actual writers at SI except the company insists in the most cynical way imaginable that it must maintain a firewall between the two orgs:
Asked if the proceeds from the parties or the live events get funneled to the media side of the business, Salter said they do not. Dienst said the bifurcation was in part to protect SI’s journalism. “We would never call an editor, a journalist or even know how to find the newsroom,” he said. “Without that editorial independence, the brand is dead.”
As mentioned before, the root cause of the layoffs is that Arena Group, the company licensing the right to publish SI, missed a payment to Authentic, and Authentic immediately pulled the license. Those journalists worked for Arena, not Authentic (who earns millions off the SI brand), because, you know, firewalls.
Prior to the dispute, Arena had been caught using AI and unpaid teens to write its content, after laying off many of its professional writers, so it wasn't exactly protecting the journalism and editorial independence Authentic claims to care about, missed payments aside.
So what happens now? Authentic claims - with maximum cynicism - that it values the product at SI:
[CEO Jamie] Salter insisted SI’s journalism remains central to his mission. “That’s the mouthpiece to the brand,” he explained. “It’s not as critically important from the financial side, but what we put out there from journalism [is the] core. If you took the shoes out of Reebok, I’m not sure Reebok would be Reebok anymore.”
But said product is not 'critically important', which is why Authentic is considering proposals to once again license SI to another media shop or sell it back to Arena so they can 'pivot to video' which has never worked for any media company, ever.
Unlike most tales of media companies drowning under the weight of staff costs and declining ad revenue, SI has a million print subscribers and healthy web traffic and is reported to at least break even, which is a Herculean achievement these days. It is a viable business, being bled dry by leeches at both ends.
Also, the guy in charge of SI's future seems more concerned with the sort of reporting a billionaire douchebro consumes than, you know, sports:
[Salter] continued: “These guys should have a Super Bowl edition after the Super Bowl ... because I want to know about Kanye West getting kicked out [of a party]. I want to know about Kim Kardashian. ... Take a page out of entertainment. Why does my wife watch ‘Entertainment Tonight’? She wants to see all the stuff that’s happening. ... I can tell you I’m inside. I’m on the owners’ floors. I’m in the boxes where it’s all happening. It was unbelievable, but I saw it. You didn’t get to see it, so you don’t really know. You only know what you saw on social media. But I saw it all.”
He's right, we don't get to see it, because profit-chasing Neanderthals like Salter and his vacuous, incurious ilk have bought up and suffocated as much of the media landscape as they can, treating storied journalistic brands as nothing more than logos they can slap on a DJ booth to charge a hundred grand for bottle service.
VICE
There are many ways to destroy a storied journalistic institution, and Vice Media bravely charted its own path - last week it announced it would be laying off most of its staff and shutting down its website. To read the NYT account, it was all just a regrettable inability to produce the necessary revenues in a difficult digital media landscape:
The layoffs come amid gale-force headwinds for the entire media industry. Over the past year, almost every major news publisher, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Vox Media and The Los Angeles Times, has made cuts to its operations. Web traffic to news organizations has declined precipitously as users are spending time with nontraditional media forms like TikTok and Instagram.
It gives only passing mention to Vice's new owners - a PE consortium led by Fortress Investment Group - and their aggressive cost-cutting:
Instead, Fortress has decided to make sweeping cuts, as part of an attempt to stem the endless tide of red ink. The company is planning to inform employees of its new business strategy in the next week.
What is this 'new business strategy'? According to Vice's executives: content licensing and re-emphasized social media channels, whatever that means.
There is a story to tell about Vice's meteoric rise in the 2000s and its founder Shane Smith's extravagant lifestyle and eventual payday as Vice's valuation soared, but that story does not address or really impact what happened to the outlet in the last couple of years.
Despite a general downturn in its finances after 2017, Vice continued to pay a lot of executives a lot of money to make the same bad decisions that sent its finances spiraling down the drain.
The company's bankruptcy filing in 2023 revealed just how much those in charge were cashing in while they squeezed Vice's journalists and contributors:
Vice chief communications officer Jonathan Bing took home $640,000 in salary and bonuses in the 12 months prior to Vice's bankruptcy filing; chief operating officer Cory Haik took home $726,000; executive vice president Subrata De was paid $779,000; chief marketing officer Nadja Bellan-White hauled in $835,000.
Not only were Vice's executives being paid handsomely to drive the company into the ground, they issued themselves massive 'retention' bonuses right before the bankruptcy filing - a filing which, conveniently, allowed them to avoid paying severance to regular employees spelled out in their union contracts.
Many of those same executives are still with the company, presumably earning at least what they were pre-bankruptcy, and lording over the company taking its website offline and potentially erasing decades of good journalism at the push of a button.
I have cited Vice (or VICE, a nod to its punk roots) in these pages quite a few times, and it has published reams of valuable, well-reported stories across every genre. If Smith's wild promises to investors did anything, it gave a bunch of good journalists and bloggers the breathing room to do some great work.
But, like all things smudged by the rotten finger of financialization, Vice became a pot of money for its executives and eventual private equity owners - to be drained, not refilled.
When Fortress looked at Vice it didn't see a bloated C-suite with a long track record of failure, it saw a bloated staff of (unionized) reporters and contractors, many making a few hundred bucks a story and said let's get rid of those people, because we can pivot to 'social media'. I'm sure AI has been bandied about in strategy meetings.
Maybe they'll turn Vice into a lifestyle brand and throw Fashion Week parties capitalizing the cache the outlet earned doing years of real reporting. I hear there's money in it.
Product Reviews
For the publishers left battling Google and Facebook's algorithms for clicks, things are no less grim. We have talked extensively about what Google's general neglect of its search product and recent embrace of AI-generated content has done to the ability to find anything online. We've talked about Amazon's failure to police its marketplace, resulting in reams of fraudulent items being sold in place of quality goods.
What we haven't previously discussed is the way digital publishers are cannibalizing their own - large sites with significant search ranking are repackaging (stealing?) other peoples' content to rank higher for product reviews, a common search behavior that can net publishers affiliate revenue from sponsored links.
HouseFresh is an independent product review blog, and they are sick of the bullshit:
Savvy SEOs at big media publishers (or third-party vendors hired by them) realized that they could create pages for ‘best of’ product recommendations without the need to invest any time or effort in actually testing and reviewing the products first.
In one example, Better Homes & Gardens (owned by Dotdash Meredith, a media conglomerate) writes an article claiming it has done its own tests on air purifiers, even though there's no evidence:
They mention that they have tested 67 air purifiers in their lab in Des Moines, Iowa, but somehow, they have published zero product reviews and they don’t make their test data available anywhere.
Then there are the purifiers BH&G actually recommends which are, well, you'd have to really try to find worse products?
For example, Better Homes & Gardens recommends the Molekule Air Mini+ as their best option for small rooms...
We have no idea how this device made the list considering that Molekule recently filed for bankruptcy, has active class action lawsuits for false advertising, has been recognized by Wirecutter as the worst air purifier they tested, and received the honor of being labeled as “not living up to the hype” by Consumer Reports.
Oh yeah, that's the good stuff. What probably happened was whatever poor intern the magazine has rounding up Amazon affiliate links did a search for 'air purifier small room' and this sketchy thing came up, so they ran with it.
Nor is BH&G the only offender, another site owned by Meredith is doing the same thing, with the...same pictures, from the same alleged reviewer!
Now, Real Simple doesn’t mention a lab in Des Moines, Iowa, but they do say they acquired 56 air purifiers to test AND they named the same expert: Kenneth Mendez.
Similarly to Better Homes & Gardens, there are no air purifier reviews on the entire site. That’s 56 devices that we just have to trust they actually tested and assessed.
[...]
That’s probably why both sites have the same design and feature photos from the same freelance photographer (Henry Wortock).
How awful, you may be thinking. This one big, terrible publisher is using its established media brands to push real product review blogs down in the rankings and cash in on search clicks by directing people to bad ripoff products on Amazon. But it gets worse!
BuzzFeed recently shuttered its excellent News division and has been in the News itself for its botched SPAC and the huge debt load it took on as a result. I will absolutely not go on record defending non-News BuzzFeed as 'journalism' or anything like that but at least their listicles or whatever weren't actively misleading their readers:
Similarly [sic] to most big media publisher recommendations, BuzzFeed also lists the Molekule Air Mini+.
Reading through the list, we found the BuzzFeed team doesn’t even pretend to test the air purifiers. There’s no firsthand research other than curating a list of devices and images from Amazon...
BuzzFeed is now making 'product review' pages that are literally just Amazon reviews ripped and reposted on their site, and getting ranked above real product reviewers. Great!
There is always so much happening, and it is easy to get lost in the macro scale misery Google is inflicting on those of us who dare expect their website to surface relevant information in searches. I appreciate dedicated bloggers (and product reviewers) like the folks at HouseFresh who are, ironically, doing more actual journalism than the combined staffs at major lifestyle magazines and media websites.
[CW: Child sexualization, abuse, graphic language]
While journalism feels the claws of capital digging deeper, robbing it of oxygen, what's going on with the place everyone consumes things these days - social media?
Here's an article about how thousands of 'parent-run' accounts for preteen girls on Instagram are profiting off pedophiles:
Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
This is the deeply dark side of our burgeoning influencer economy. One in three preteens has dreams of becoming an influencer. Eleven percent of Gen Z describes themselves that way. And yet, the biggest platforms for this new trend seem to have no guardrails preventing parents from exploiting their kids for clout, money, or both?
The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.
I am not a parent, but it is difficult for me to wrap my head around what motivates one to use images of a young daughter to build a large following of perverts so you can establish brand relationships?
“I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet,” said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia, who like Elissa and many other parents interviewed by The Times agreed to be identified only by a middle name to protect the privacy of her child.
“But she’s been doing this so long now,” she said. “Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”
I mean! Yes! That is most definitely an option!
Instagram allows anonymous browsing, and creating an account on the platform requires little in the way of verification. There is certainly no way to identify convicted sex offenders, some of whom the Times interviewed for the piece. Online chats populated by pedophiles share accounts of young girls. There is effectively zero oversight of this entire sick operation.
Private equity firms and brand management conglomerates loot the tombs of real reporting and quality content. SEO shops pollute search results with aggregated, regurgitated nonsense. Also, the photo app we post our food and vacation pictures on is funding an underground child exploitation economy. Cool.
A Treat
This has all been extremely depressing and something we like to do around here is track comeuppance being delivered to some of society's most deserving shitheads. Here's a roundup:
A judge ruled conspiracy nut Mike Lindell must pay $5 million to the man who debunked his election fraud claims.
A jury found the NRA and Wayne LaPierre mismanaged charitable funds. LaPierre must pay $4.3 million in damages.
Trump lost an appeals bid to pause his $450 million dollar civil judgement. He asked to be allowed to post only a $100 million dollar bond and was refused, though the judge did pause the order barring Trump from finding a NY bank to float him the money. He has until March 25th.
Warner Bros Discovery shares fell 10% after a bad earnings report. CEO David Zaslav insists this is good, actually. Shares are down 45% in the last year.
Short Cons
Hollywood Reporter - "Smith is believed to be paid a multimillion-dollar annual salary and likely far more in commissions and bonuses under the terms of a multiyear deal that began in 2019 and is scheduled to finish at the end of 2024, a well-placed source says."
Jacobin - "After years of relentless union busting — costing the company nearly a quarter-billion dollars, in one estimate — Starbucks Workers United has now forced the corporation to negotiate. It may prove the most important organizing breakthrough in decades."
WaPo - "The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s media company filed a lawsuit Wednesday, claiming that Trump and other leaders had schemed to deprive them of a stake in the company that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars."
Reuters - "U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk's Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in humans..."
Reuters - "Attorney General Letitia James said JBS USA Food Co, the Brazilian company's American-based unit, has "no viable plan" to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, making its stated commitment to achieving that goal false and misleading."
Common Dreams - ""The United States remains the world's dominant military power," the senator continued. "Alone, we account for roughly 40% of global military spending; the U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are allies. Last year, we spent more than three times what China spent on its military.""
The Atlantic - "Is there a right way for Google’s generative AI to create fake images of Nazis? Apparently so, according to the company. Gemini, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, was shown last week to generate an absurd range of racially and gender-diverse German soldiers styled in Wehrmacht garb."
BBC - "The event was advertised as a "journey filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn". But one visitor told BBC Scotland News that it was little more than "an abandoned, empty warehouse"."
Quartz - "The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday outlawed robocalls that contain voices generated by artificial intelligence, a decision that sends a clear message that exploiting the technology to scam people and mislead voters won’t be tolerated."
Know someone thinking of running an iconic media brand into the ground? Send them HERE!