#SaveSI

Deep down, my guess is that the effort to save Sports Illustrated is doomed to fail.  On the one hand, it's not that difficult to understand - the magazine has been a shadow of its former self for a while now, which has been the case for many formerly great weekly periodicals.  It's now a biweekly publication, and the days are long past when the stories have the same kind of immediacy they did back in the pre-Internet era. 

But on the other hand, the thinking that goes into this kind of decision on the part of TheMaven makes no sense to me.  My son has now worked for two companies in the past year that were acquired by a larger company, with the only apparent purpose seeming to be to run the business into the ground and then sell the spare parts for profit.  Someone must be making a lot of money from these types of business strategies, but there doesn't seem to be much point to the exercise, aside from that.

If we are near the end of Sports Illustrated, that is something worth mourning.  For more than 60 years, the magazine was a source of incredible writing, and incredible photography.  There are a dozen or so boxes sitting out in my garage, and inside of them are old copies of Sports Illustrated, going all the way back to 1969.  Sports Illustrated has been an important part - a formative part - of my life.  Its legacy will live on through the former writers who go on to work in other venues, but even if that happens (and it has already happened in some instances), it just won't be the same.