The Arena Group, the parent company that owns Sports Illustrated, fired its CEO Ross Levinsohn on Monday, according to reports. The axing of the top boss comes just a couple weeks after a scandal at Sports Illustrated involving content generated by artificial intelligence was uncovered. Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-Hour Energy, who owns a majority stake in The Arena Group was named interim CEO. What is to become of the once legendary sports publication?
“All of the media brands, including Sports Illustrated, will continue to operate with the management of those verticals, while the company just takes a broad view of operations and how to improve the business overall,” Bhargava’s spokesperson Vince Bodiford told CNN.
Sports Media Business Is Changing
The Arena Group owns a variety of publications in the sports, business and lifestyle verticals. But the business model that proved successful for mainly print publications has not proved sustainable in the digital age and the entire journalism field is undergoing a massive change.
These publications are all run like businesses and in their current form they are not profitable and the future is unclear, so companies like The Arena Group are hoping to make innovations and bets on the future with the hope they’re right and turn these failing businesses back into profit centers.
Unfortunately, the innovations and bets made by a company like The Arena Group will likely not do anything to improve content.
The Arena Group is owned by Simplify Inventions, a venture capital company. The goal of a VC company is simple, generate return on investments to its limited partners.
The Future Is Unclear
Bhargava is not a content creator, he is a businessman. That’s not to say that only a content creator can run a publication. But his focus is the bottom line. He doesn’t view Sports Illustrated’s audience as anything more than a segment of potential buyers of products for advertisers. That probably governs his decisions about what to do vis-à-vis the publication.
The world is changing. How we consume sports and sports content is changing. So sports and the media companies that cover sports have to change as well. Human beings don’t like change, despite the fact that it is the only constant in life.
It’s unclear what the future holds for Sports Illustrated and sports media as a whole. But it will certainly look much different than it does today, as it looks different today from 20 years ago.
