How Jim Heckman — the slick businessman behind the mass layoffs at Sports Illustrated — became the most hated man in sports media
In 2009, he helped start 5to1, an online ad sales platform, raising $19.3 million from Fuse Capital and Prism Venture Management, among others.To hear Heckman tell it, his experience has been one success after another, and that now he's going to apply that digital media know-how to fix Sports Illustrated.
"Their strategy for content has not worked," he said. "Their journalists are good, but nobody's reading their stuff. The company was nose-diving into oblivion. Their users have collapsed to 17 million, their print distribution is below 2 million. So, when people are saying, 'Save it,' can you imagine, 'Hey, here's our plan, we're going to keep doing the same thing?' I mean, it's comical.
It also doesn't help that Sports Illustrated has to fight comparisons with The Athletic, a heavily funded and fast-growing string of subscription sports sites. But there's no guarantee that company will hit its lofty goals, either.But the contributor model he's proposing -- which echoes one Levinsohn planned to try at The Los Angeles Times — is the product of a bygone era that publishers and advertisers have moved on from.
But Heckman's more recent sources of money have been unconventional. He's funded Maven's acquisitions — which included Say Media, TheStreet for $16 million, and a $45 million payment to ABG — with massive amounts of debt financing, a type of funding that typically comes at a high cost, by a subsidiary of a firm that's little-known in media circles, B Riley Financial.
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