Slate: Sports Illustrated is broken, but here is how to fix it

In this week's issue, Alexander Wolff has a long piece on Alberto Salazar that looks pretty interesting, though I haven't gotten to it yet. Whenever I'm back home I check out my dad's old issues, being that he has every one since 71. It's strange looking back and seeing someone like Salazar on the cover. Speaking of SI taking stands, remember when they had a huge cover piece on pit bulls? That was a little out there. But it was nice seeing Wolff's byline again. He was always one of my favorites, but has seemingly disappeared from there over the years while he ran that semipro basketball team. With the cuts in the last year, maybe writers like him will be doing more stories.

Now, if only Curry Kirkpatrick would come back (was he the first to switch from SI to ESPN, way back when?)

 

levin writes that SI needs good writing and reporting

that's supposed to be an insight?

but if you read closely, levin's idea of good writing and reporting is vague and ill-defined - it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that

there's no blueprint for good writing or good journalism - it's like pornography - you know it when you see it

comparing SI's market position today to yesteryear is an exercise in nostalgia - why don't we shed a tear for Sport Magazine, too

who cares, really, if Time-Warner gets clobbered by Disney, or vice versa - how long before one buys the other?

 

And it's not like Slate is burning up the Internets...I still don't know how it is supposed to differ from Salon.

 

I agree with Jones - too often, the writing seems house-ified - but I don't know if that's my biggest issue. A question to you older-and-wiser-s: have the stories THEMSELVES - content-wise - become less interesting in recent years? I now groan when I open to the Contents and see the requisite Feature About Team With Great Chemistry Now Unexpectedly Thriving, Feature About How Good Certain College Football Team Is, and other Requisite Features I can't think of at the moment. One piece an issue - a Smith, a Price on Coolbaugh - is inherently interesting, is worthy of literary treatment; so much of the rest seems like it's written according to a Sports Illustrated Story Template. I'm not a fan.

Was it always like this? Is it not currently like this?

Are Conspicuous Capitals as annoying as "air quotes"?

 

(Just read the Slate piece. I love it.)

 

Don't kid yourself, SI (and Time-Life in general) have always been very heavy-handed with copy. There's always been a certain desk-aided tone to an SI story, right down to punching up quotes. It's no coincidence that athletes seem to speak exclusively in drop-dead precision when they talk to SI.

Some of the immortals from SI's golden age got considerable help from anonymous deskers.

 

Maybe the adjustments they've made are a reason they've kept pace.

 

I think one of the problems is that many of these magazines feel the need to hype up what everyone else is hyping up to maintain readership. Take, for example, the recent NBA previews for both teams. Both had the Celtics on the cover — and oddly enough, very similar pictures — which I think is really just a ploy to the uninformed reader. OF COURSE, the Celtics are going to be better. OF COURSE, it's a melting pot of superstars. OF COURSE, the Celtics are relevant again.

But why not a story about the great young NBA players who get lost in the shuffle, hidden behing LeBron and Dwyane and CP3, etc? Why not a story about how the gambling issue of last season is likely to affect this season?

One of the major problems I have with SI now is that every Price piece and every Smith piece — now, don't get me wrong, they're my two favorite writers and completely unbelievable — seems like it needs to go deeper and tug at heart strings when maybe it can just be a well-written story.

Take something like Smith's piece on Agassi a few years ago. Probably one of the 10 best stories I've ever read in any magazine. There was nothing particularly spectacular about the story — only that it was perfectly crafted and had me hooked from word 1 to word 10001.

What SI needs to do is this: Worry more about putting out a damn good magazine that getting a 18-year old Dbag to read it...

 

<i>What SI needs to do is this: Worry more about putting out a damn good magazine that getting a 18-year old Dbag to read it...</i>


And the reality is if you don't snag some of those younger readers, you're going to be left in ESPN magazine's dust. In addition to developing a new generation that makes your magazine a habit, you have to show the ad agencies that your readership isn't hopelessly top-heavy with over-50s who are poison to ad buyers.

 

Maybe. But I was reacting to a knee-jerk attitude that it's "complacency" if you aren't constantly changing your product. I think there's a very dangerous mind-set in print right now that if someone indicates something is not a good idea, it's perceived as resisting any change at all. It's not all that uncommon to hear good editors say, in essence, "We have to do something." Well, that's true, we do have to do something. But that doesn't mean we have to do anything. We don't have to look very far to see newspapers and magazines that are far worse for their cures than they were for the original ailment. Too often the current solution is to try something that's already been tried, only the editor's grasp of history is so weak that he doesn't know it's already been tried, even at his own publication. What we have are mad scientists harvesting the body parts of the corpses of failed experiments and piecing them together into Frankenstein's monster -- ugly, awkward, inarticulate, zombielike.

 

One of the common things I've talked to my reporter about when editing is what I consider overediting. I talk to her about that because she becomes a copy editor on our production day.

One example of what I try to warn against was when one of my writers turned in a feature on a small restaurant out in the deep part of our county. He used a literary device throughout the piece. She wanted to cut it short. I was equally adamant about leaving that device the way it was. Since I'm her boss, I won.

I made one edit: Changing from "urban" to "street corner." The writer e-mailed me back and praised it, saying it made all the difference.

Editing for journalism style if it isn't there or editing to clean up mistakes is one thing. Editing that ends up killing a unique voice and turning it formulaic is completely different. I never want to do the latter.