Cleveland Browns News 1/20: Praise from Players, New Pro Bowlers, and Chaos at Sports Illustrated

As the Browns prepare for offensive coaching staff changes, the team’s reputation gets burnished by players on national platforms and part of our communal sports childhoods is seemingly doomed.

Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!

Yesterday, I talked about life in the crowded sports media space, and within an hour after that was published, the business claimed a major victim: Sports Illustrated. The once-venerable sports giant has been gripped by chaos these last three years as they tried to expand the brand, a move that included bolting on a series of locally-focused team sites that drew derision from the “old guard” as being a bunch of amateur bloggers.

The funny thing, if there’s anything funny about what happened here, is that the locally-focused team sites were successful financially but that the well-regarded magazine and website struggled. That’s a story you won’t read about in the press accounts on this tragic situation, and one which points out how just upside-down the economics of the sports media is these days.

The media world is a strange and brutal one, and yesterday, it claimed a victim that comprised part of our communal sports childhood. A memorial of sorts started up on the Watercooler.

The situation around Sports Illustrated is a complicated one that has been consistently reported upon poorly in the press, which doesn’t understand the history of Scout.com, which mutated into a portion of 247Sports as well as The Maven, which itself turned into the Arena Group, which participated in the final days of Sports Illustrated. I was a witness to much of this, both as an employee and a publisher participating in one network and pursued by the other.

I’m not going to use this space to go into details, only to say that the history is much more complicated than what you read in the associated accounts.

Instead, let’s focus on happier news. Such as this: