Sports Illustrated is the Saturday Night Live of magazines. For 20 years, journalists have been declaring it dead, saying it barely resembles the hallowed institution of their youth. This week, SI overlords James Heckman and Ross Levinsohn did something amazing. They warmed up a cold take. And they did it with a streak of inadvertent comedy. Heckman and Levinsohn are like morticians who drop a corpse while carrying it to the coffin and then trash the deceased in the funeral program.
This week’s sign of the apocalypse was the firing of soccer writer Grant Wahl, who’d worked for the magazine for 24 years. Wahl said that Maven—the company that reached a deal to license and operate SI last summer—asked him to take a 30 percent pay cut due to the coronavirus ad crunch. Wahl was fine with a temporary cut. But in an Instagram Story, he worried that the Mavens were using a pandemic to permanently lower his salary. On Friday, Wahl was fired. “No severance,” he tweeted. “Nothing.”
Using the grace notes he has come to be known for, Heckman wrote a memo to SI’s staff bashing Wahl. Heckman revealed that Wahl made upward of $350,000. He accused Wahl of being reluctant to take a cut (not true, Wahl said) and writing too few stories that had too little impact (Wahl pumps out stories and podcasts at a fearsome rate). In a note slagging an ex-employee, Heckman said Wahl lacked Maven’s team spirit.
That was a true numbskull move. But it wasn’t the first of Maven’s coronavirus follies. Faced with a global crisis and a mass cancellation of games, Heckman’s initial instinct was to deny that Sports Illustrated would suffer damage. On March 23, Heckman told Ben Strauss of The Washington Post that such concerns were “pretty silly.” “We are a $150 million business, continue to forecast a profitable year, and our traffic continues to scale up,” said Heckman. Exactly one week after the Post story was published, Maven laid off 9 percent of its employees.
There’s no reason to brag that your publication is invulnerable to a worldwide crisis. The only possible reason is that chest-beating is your first language, and you know no other way to communicate.
And that’s not all. Three weeks ago, the Maven guys told the Sports Illustrated union that its recognition was “imminent” (the union’s word) and that they would double severance payments during the pandemic, according to a union statement issued Friday. After laying off eight bargaining unit members, Maven still hasn’t recognized the union, and there is no double severance. “Their stalling deprived us of the rights we would have had as a recognized union to bargain over the layoffs’ impact,” the statement said.
Heckman and Levinsohn think they’re executing a game plan. At a November Code Media conference, Levinsohn said he’d been called a “change agent.” You know, the kind of guy who likes to break shit, most of all his writers’ spirits.
But the Mavens have been soaked in accidental comedy since they took over Sports Illustrated. In October, two “transition” meetings were called at SI. Staffers realized that one meeting was for employees who would keep their jobs; the other meeting contained a trap door to hell for those who would be let go.
The Maven plan to “save” SI is to turn it into a wagon train of team sites. Critics figured this would lead to a bunch of site operators (“entrepreneurs,” in Maven-speak) announcing “I got hired by Sports Illustrated!” and then pumping out low-nutrient posts.
I’m not sure any critic could anticipate the qualities such posts would take. In November, Maven discovered that it was publishing contributions from a 17-year-old high school student. (A treasured detail: When the student wrote his audition post, he gave it to his English teacher to look over.) In December, Maven’s USC writer had sources telling him head coach Clay Helton would be fired; Helton kept his job. Ron Borges, a former Boston Herald columnist who was apparently fooled by a prankster posing as Tom Brady’s agent, has contributed dozens of stories to the SI expanded universe.
On April Fools’ Day, the New York Post’s Mike Puma complained that an SI writer used one of his interviews without appropriate credit. (The writer apologized.) The spirit animal of the old SI was fictional pitcher Sidd Finch. Under Maven, it’s Sidd Pinch.
These episodes are well-known. But true connoisseurs collect Maven’s B-sides, as well. When Heckman and Levinsohn stepped onstage at the Code Media conference, perhaps they expected full mogul treatment. But the first question from interviewer Peter Kafka was about charges of “unseemly behavior.” Levinsohn, according to an NPR report, was twice a defendant in sexual harassment lawsuits. (An investigation by Tronc, a former Levinsohn employer, found no wrongdoing.)
In the midst of a long answer, Levinsohn told Kafka: “Nothing was proven to be true.” Can you imagine a more amazing protestation of innocence from a media executive? When you add that to Heckman’s Wahl memo, you begin to see a distinctive Maven style. They do bad things to journalism in the goofiest possible way.
During a previous round of Mavening, I wrote that Heckman and Levinsohn inspire a feeling of powerlessness in their critics. If you buy a subscription to SI, you give money to Heckman and Levinsohn. If you fight back like Wahl, you get fired. If you assure displaced SI writers they’ll do great things in this business, you ignore a melting economy.
There’s one only move left. It’s not much when journalists have lost jobs, but it’s something. The Maven guys want to be known as cold-eyed mavericks. The last six months have shown that as craven as they are, they will always be more buffoonish. Our last move is to point at them and laugh. They can’t even mess up journalism right.
