What Happened to Sports Illustrated!? Why the Decline? Is Sports Journalism Dying? Is this Just An Issue for People Over Age 40? Former Free Press Reporter & Author Mark Snyder Shares His Insights!

The Best Paragraph I've Read: S.L. Price was a newspaper guy, making his bones as a young reporter at the Sacramento Bee and Miami Herald in the ’80s and ’90s. He covered sports, but those publications also allowed him to dip in on other beats; one day he might be reporting from the Olympics, the next he would be in thick of hurricane coverage. “I loved working for newspapers so much,” Price said. But in 1994, enticed by a significant salary bump, he left the world of dailies for a job at Sports Illustrated. It didn’t take long for Price to realize that he had reached a promised land. “It was the gold standard,” he recalled. Price spent the next 26 years at Sports Illustrated, authoring 47 cover stories and profiling the likes of Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, and even Barack Obama. For much of that time, the magazine hummed with all of its editorial horsepower. “Everybody in the building was smarter than you, and they made you look better,” he said of Sports Illustrated’s salad days, when the magazine was still flush with advertising revenue, and its pages rich with high-quality journalism. Price and his colleagues were supported by a deep newsroom infrastructure and empowered by the financial strength of the magazine, allowing it to become “a hub of great ideas and daring journalism.” Whereas “the problem with journalism today,” he added, is that “so much of it is undermined subtly by this lack of confidence, fueled by a lack of money.”   This paragraph comes from Vanity Fair. The article is titled: "The Worst That It's Ever Been": Inside Sports Illustrated Winter of Discontent." The author is Tom Kludt. You can read the full article here: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/sports-illustrated-future Reporter and Author Mark Synder joins Zac and Don to talk about the decline of Sports Illustrated. They talk about what Sports Illustrated used to mean and how it has declined. They also talk about how the business of sports journalism has changed.