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Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

Seeing Sports Illustrated fall is a bummer. This was a mainstay, important read for millions back in the day. As a kid I grew up with SI, and the brand was so large there were even offshot magazines (SI for Kids...etc).

My childhood was spent pouring over Sports, Nature, and Gaming magazines. While the web has provide a lot of that information in a much easier to search way, the discovery mechanisms that a smaller, but more focused set of media brands created were fantastic. You could rely on people having read / scene the larger touchstones of culture and it led to more connection.

There are a lot of great things about the Internet and the specification of news / knowledge, but part of me worries that the division we're seeing in society are a direct result of folks not having reliable sources of shared experience.

I don't know how to solve it. I worked in publishing for over a dozen years, and it only seems to be getting worse and worse.

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I'm not a huge sports fan. I'd rather play than watch but I did have a SI subscription as a kid. As a teen, I thougfhrly enjoyed the swimsuit editions.

However, IMHO the article has missed it. Article claims that SI is a failure because "Real Journalism" is dying and SI should have used real writers.

I don't think so, SI has been falling (like a lot of print) since the internet. Sports people want to read and talk about sports, SI was that outlet and they've lost the marginal subscriber. Now there are limitless places to go for a sports fix.

SI was doomed from the beginning and lack of "Real Journalism" wouldn't have saved it.

The real interesting question is does the brand still have value (Maybe not 1M/month) and what to do with it now.

Sports journalism has also never been a paragon of "real journalism." While there are certainly examples of great investigative pieces, much of what is written is dependent on access to and cultivating relationships with the subjects themselves (who in turn needed the media outlets for public exposure). With the internet and social media, athletes seem have decided to cut out the middleman via a slew of their own podcasts/yt channels/IG feeds.

Yeah, the latter is an important point people tend to overlook. Originally the only way to get news about companies/product announcements, sports, art, music, media, etc was through third party middlemen in the way of news organisations and magazines. Now none of those need said middlemen anymore and can just reach their fans/customers/users directly through their own sites and social media profiles.

So there's arguably no real value proposition for most subject specific news outlets anymore.

I don't remember during exactly what period I had an SI subscription (I was much more into sports long ago) but at one point I probably was subscribing to 20 magazines. Today I don't pay for one. (Though I do have a couple of digital subscriptions I pay for.)

And I probably dropped many of them before the quality deterioration became obvious. They just didn't fill a real need any longer and they were just piling up on my coffee table.

Maybe the solution starts with the next generation of parents who have seen the direct harm the internet in its current state poses to human mental/social development.

Maybe (hopefully sooner rather than later) these parents enforce restrictions or come together to form networks that have the ability to provide some consistency and deep rooted social interaction with clear links directly to the real world, but not tied down to it, away from the giants of advertising that will always feed their users sugar and no veggies.

Maybe, of course, this has to take the form of a product that generates revenue, and maybe that makes the entire vision of a healthy widely-adopted internet an impossibility.

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