When I was growing up, Sports Illustrated was THE magazine for sports enthusiasts. It was the magazine that you got excited when at the dentist’s office (because you knew that someone already did all the fun stuff in Highlights. I mean, the kids should have known that these are communal magazines. Don’t bust out the crayons and mark that up. Other people will want to use them in the future. Just do the puzzle in your head. Honestly. What’s wrong with you?). So, it comes with great dismay that I have to tear SI to pieces (kind of like those stupid Highlights marking kids. You know who you are.).
On my IE favorites, I have CNN marked. SI.com is part of the CNN website. Each day I’ll take a look at ESPN for the scoreboard and MSN-Fox Sports for the Dime Smack (see the side link) and Ben Maller’s Rumors. Later in the day, I’ll go back to ESPN for the Page 2 columns and an occasional MLB/NBA story. Every once in a while, I’ll go over to SI and peep some of their articles.
This leads me to me first complaint. The articles are littered with spelling typos (At least, I hope they are typos for SI’s sake). Just today, I was reading the last “I Hate Barry Bonds” article and noticed a blatant typo. Here is the run-on sentence that contains said typo:
“Bonds’ attorney, Michael Rains, has thrown his share of smoke bombs to divert attention from the facts: challenging the authors’ right to profit from the book (he summarily dropped the challenge, with virtually no hope of success), and now trying to demand disclosure by the feds of how much money they’ve spent on investigating Bonds and, ironically enough, asking them to continue spending more money in the case by continuing to pursue the identify of people who might have leaked information, though the chief leaker already has been outed.”
Did you catch it? “By continuing to pursue the INDENTIFY of people?
Come on now. It’s an article that isn’t breaking news, so the writer should have had plenty of time to compose it. I mean, I can understand that maybe a writer slipped up and typed the wrong word (I know I do all the time) but where’s the editor? I caught that and I hold an Economics degree. Somebody hire an English major, please.
But that’s only half the problem.
The other half is the amazing amount of space their website uses to advertise the “swimsuit” issue.
I like naked ladies as much as any other hetero man, but when I’m AT WORK looking for sports related news, less is definitely better.
It’s like SI only exists to publish one issue a year and the rest is all fluff. Honestly, go over to SI.com and count how many swimsuit ads you see. I skipped of over the homepage and went directly to the aforementioned article and I still saw 2 ads.
What’s even more disconcerting is the fact that for the past week or longer CNN’s homepage has listed “Beyonce – Swimsuit edition” as on of the two newest articles from SI. Do they think we are going to buy that this is A) an actual news worthy article and B) is still news after being around for a week?
Am I just being selfish about how I think the magazine should be run? I’m pretty sure the swimsuit issue is the big money earner for SI. So, my bitching about that won’t change anything. But then again, ESPN’s Page 2 has occasionally offered a “work mode.” This is a button you click and you get to view the content of the page with out all the formatting (i.e. it looks like you are looking at a text document). Why can’t SI do something like that?
Does anyone else agree with me on this? Let me know.
Posted by Mikey 
