Authentic Brands Group, which purchased Sports Illustrated from Meredith Publishing hasn’t exactly been happy with the way The Maven has been running the iconic magazine. ABG licensed the publishing rights for Sports Illustrated to digital group The Maven after its purchase.
Ben Strauss wrote about what Sports Illustrated staffers are calling “chaos” in his December column for The Washington Post. Authentic Brands Group is a licensing group that purchased SI largely for the merchandising potential of the brand and its iconic “Swimsuit Issue.” Strauss noted that if Authentic Brands Group feels like the Sports Illustrated brand is being damaged, it could revoke that publishing license from The Maven.
“Without a healthy Sports Illustrated, the thinking goes, ABG might struggle to monetize the SI brand,” Strauss wrote.
Jamie Salter, the CEO of Authentic Brands, spoke with The Wrap. He defended some of The Maven’s moves. He said that the 9% reduction in staff is “no different than any other big corporation or small corporation that has done as far as pay cuts and furloughs and reduction of head count.”
He did add that Authentic Brands couldn’t defend every move The Maven has made and has asked that some of the decisions be undone.
“I can honestly say some of it we haven’t agreed with as the holder of the license, and we sort of expressed our opinion to TheMaven folks and told them that they need to sort of reverse some of their actions of what they had done because we don’t necessarily agree.”
It was the firing of former SI senior writer Grant Wahl that got the ball rolling on discussions of ABG’s expectations of The Maven as the license holder for SI’s publishing rights. Wahl was fired after he spoke out about the layoffs and cost-cutting measures taken by the company.
That led to a very public war of words between Wahl and James Heckman, CEO of The Maven. Heckman claimed that Wahl would not take a payout during the economic downturn although he knew that would mean other people would lose their jobs. The feud certainly has not been good for the moral inside the building or the public perception of Sports Illustrated.
