Sports Illustrated’s decline runs in parallel to the ongoing, continuing collapse of real journalism and the whole accurately informing the public thing–which has never been much of a money maker. There were a record number of media layoffs last year, as trust fund brunchlords and the incompetent stewards of a dying press hustle and jockey to make a quick buck shuffling bloated brand corpses around.
It’s more profitable to make a quick buck striking acquisition deals and pointless mergers for the tax breaks — generating automated clickbait and bullshit at historic scale and using what’s left of popular brands to sell junk — than it is to pay real reporters a living wage to create quality journalism. The end result of that lazy mindset is everywhere you look. And it seems to be getting worse.
Despite a lot of lip service, we’ve never really spent a whole lot of time actually trying to find creative new funding options for real journalism at any meaningful scale. Certainly nowhere near the time and effort put into get rich quick tech fads like NFTs. The stewards of what’s left have no interest in real journalism, or funding it. They’re in it to make a quick buck off the fading remnants of a dying industry, cutting corners, firing employees, and pursuing easy money wherever possible.
As a result journalism — sports or otherwise — is steadily being replaced by a parade of automated gibberish, clickbait, well-funded propaganda, and marketing, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to find anybody with the ethics and resources interested in reversing — or even combating — the trajectory.
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