Executives told staff members on Thursday that about half the newsroom would be laid off, according to two people present at the meetings. The 65-year-old magazine will be run by a digital publisher.

Source: ‘Sports Illustrated’ Sets Massive Layoffs, Journalists Rebel : NPR

The era of the weekly print magazine died some time ago.

“Top journalists” might not be as special as they think they are:

“TheMaven wants to replace top journalists in the industry with a network of Maven freelancers and bloggers, …”

It may be that the value of a journalist was that the journalist was integrated with a printing press or broadcast license. Today, that value proposition has blown up. The “old” journalist had power through the control of information via access to printing presses and broadcast facilities.

Today, everyone can be a journalist – thanks to social media, blogs and what not. Consequently, the journalists that relied on limited distribution and information control have much less value in a world where everyone has a printing press and broadcast license.

As we have seen in recent years, the quality of journalism has suffered with embarrassing errors, fired star anchors and reporters (after #metoo took hold), and endless click-bait, gossip and speculative news stories devoid of context and facts.

The solution is to double down on fact-based, objective, rational news reporting. But that is not the direction the industry has been moving.