On April 30, the day that news broke of the coming demise of ESPN The Magazine as a print publication, John Walsh received a text message. It bemoaned the loss of yet another print magazine and acknowledged Walsh’s role in launching it more than 20 years earlier.
“I thought they were talking about Inside Sports,” Walsh said with a laugh, referring to the magazine he ran nearly four decades earlier — a critical success that folded in 1982 after a three-year run.
Former ESPN President John Skipper had received an unofficial phone call from inside Bristol two hours before the announcement telling him of the magazine’s fate.
“It was a poignant moment,” said Skipper, who now runs the streaming service DAZN. “I put my heart and soul into it.”
Citing changing consumer habits and the fact that more people read the magazine’s stories on digital rather than in print, ESPN said it will stop printing the magazine in September.
I reached out to Skipper and Walsh because those two executives are widely credited for coming up with the idea for the magazine and pushing for its eventual success.
When the magazine launched in March 1998, Sports Illustrated was the dominant sports weekly. Both Skipper and Walsh felt SI had become too old and staid and was ripe for competition. They believed SI spent too much time looking backward — reviewing what already happened rather than looking forward.
Skipper, who led ESPN’s publishing side, wanted the magazine to stand out. He wanted it physically bigger than other magazines. He wanted it to feel younger and hipper. ESPN wanted it to have an attitude — sort of the sports world’s version of Rolling Stone, a magazine where Skipper and Walsh had both worked.
Walsh brought an editorial sensibility to the magazine’s formation. He wanted the best reporters uncovering stories and practicing investigative reporting. Reminiscing last week, Walsh mentioned one of the magazine’s early issues that devoted 21 pages to steroids in sports.
Skipper and Walsh both talked about the talented reporters and writers who graced the magazine’s pages, people like Wright Thompson, Don Van Natta, Howard Bryant and Elizabeth Merrill.
“We assembled a really good collection of talented people,” Skipper said.
Though former SI managing editor John Papanek was ESPN’s first editor-in-chief, for the initial 18 months — while the magazine got off the ground — Walsh would spend two days every two weeks when the magazine was on deadline reading every word from every issue. He would sit through extensive planning sessions to map out how future issues would look.
“Every six months, we would throw 13 issues out and would have everybody who had anything to do with decision-making rank them one through 13,” he said. “That was a great exercise to watch what it would tell you about the ones that were ranked 10, 11 and 12 and the ones that were ranked one, two and three. It would inform our decision-making in the future.”
ESPN says the move will result in a “handful” of layoffs — less than 10 — in the print and circulation departments. Most of the writers already had been writing for other platforms.
Both Skipper and Walsh bemoaned the state of print media. “The market for print is very difficult right now,” Skipper said. “It’s all about the state of the business, which is hurting.”
Walsh agreed.
“It’s inevitable, it’s sad and you wonder most importantly about the future lives of the people who were dependent upon and worked full time and worked their tails off in the magazine,” he said.
As he reflected on the magazine’s end, Walsh started thinking about how the future of journalism will work. With digital overtaking print, he worries that the types of stories he most enjoyed are the most at risk.
“Long-form storytelling — that seems to be the biggest victim in all of this,” Walsh said. “You wonder where you are going to find these stories now. How many stories are you going to be able to read on your phone that are 7,000 words?
“We have to wonder where the future Tom Wolfes or Wright Thompsons are going to come from. Even down to the end, I mean Tom Junod, Tim Keown, Elizabeth Merrill; the columns of Howard Bryant and Peter Keating — it was something to look forward to. Even when you disagreed with something, you know that they’re trying to do something different, and it’s interesting.”
As you would expect, both Skipper and Walsh look at the magazine as a success story.
“It actually worked,” Skipper said. “It kind of went according to plan. Our business plan worked faster than expected. We got it right, right away. That doesn’t always happen.”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
