Two years ago, Sports Illustrated, which had been a weekly magazine for decades, began publishing just thirty-nine issues a year. The magazine’s revenue from print ads had been plummeting since the recession; it had dropped more than forty per cent in just the previous two years, from 100.1 million dollars, in 2015, to 57.4 million dollars, in 2017. Digital-ad revenue didn’t make up the difference, and subscriptions were down. Orders to cut costs came again and again from the publisher, Time Inc. At the start of 2018, Sports Illustrated went biweekly—around the same time that Time Inc. was sold to the media conglomerate Meredith Corporation, which published life-style magazines such as Southern Living and Cooking Light. Less than a year and a half later, in May, Meredith sold the intellectual property of Sports Illustrated to a group called Authentic Brands. When the deal was first announced, it was reported that Meredith would continue to publish the magazine for two more years. But, a few weeks after that, Authentic Brands licensed the magazine’s publishing rights to a company called Maven. A month ago, Maven laid off around a third of Sports Illustrated’s staff.

It seems that not one of the buyers had purchased Sports Illustrated because it valued the publication’s work. What concerned the buyers was how much money they could wring from their purchase. Authentic Brands held the licensing and trademark rights to celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali, and had never actually published a magazine. The company’s C.E.O., Jamie Salter, wanted to stick the Sports Illustrated name on everything from “medical clinics and sports-skills training classes to a gambling business,” Variety reported. He also wanted to make “better use of the magazine’s vast photo library.” Maven, meanwhile, laid out a scheme to launch a network of “team communities,” or local fan sites, which would post as much search-optimized content as possible, produced by news aggregators and low-paid, or even free, labor. The pitch to prospective content producers included lip service to the magazine’s tradition of deep reporting and award-winning prose, but it was impossible to imagine how the company could maintain high standards given the limited editorial and financial investments that it planned to make. Maven reportedly wanted new contributors to post stories or videos multiple times a day—at a salary of about twenty-five thousand dollars a year, with no benefits, plus bonuses for hitting traffic goals.

In 2018, Sports Illustrated had nearly three million subscribers. That was down from the magazine’s peak, and subscription numbers can be propped up by various short-term promotions. Still, that’s a lot of people. It was enough people, in fact, for the magazine to produce operating profits—not high ones, and only under cost-saving pressure, but, at least according to one Meredith spokesperson, Sports Illustrated was in the black. It had a strong and respected Web presence, and it employed well-known and influential journalists. Even during the past few months, under uncertain and demoralizing conditions, the magazine’s remaining staff has produced some of the most noteworthy stories in sports—investigations into allegations of sexual harassment against the former N.F.L. wide receiver Antonio Brown, for instance, and an instantly viral piece by Stephanie Apstein about an outburst by a Houston Astros executive following the American League Championship Series, which led to the firing of that executive during the World Series. Sports Illustrated may not have been thriving, but it wasn’t dead.

So why does Maven seem determined to kill it? Even if it hits whatever benchmarks Maven has set for it, the new Sports Illustrated will be unrecognizable. The plan isn’t to reinvest in the kind of reporting and writing that the magazine is famous for—the kind that illuminates the inner workings of sports organizations, or explains developments in strategy and analysis, or explores the lives of athletes, or investigates and exposes abuses of power. The plan is to attract “an intense community of fans”—not of Sports Illustrated but of specific teams—“who come back to the site every day,” Bill Sornsin, the C.O.O., said in a presentation. “Nobody is actually a fan of ESPN or Sports Illustrated,” he explained. “They’re a fan of the New York Giants, or the Iowa Hawkeyes, or what have you. They’re a fan of their team.”

Actually, many people were fans of Sports Illustrated. The publication helped shape the way people watch, talk about, and write about sports. The current economic environment is challenging for serious sports journalism, maybe even more than it is for other sorts of news. But economic factors—Google and Facebook siphoning off ad revenues, the proliferation of game highlights on Twitter and other free outlets—don’t fully explain what is happening with sportswriting right now. Some of the people who are ostensibly funding it seem to have little interest in what it is and what it’s for.

I learned many of the details above from a piece titled “Inside TheMaven’s Plan to Turn Sports Illustrated Into a Rickety Content Mill,” which was published, in October, by Deadspin. I learned a lot of things from Deadspin over the years. It influenced and deepened my understanding of the conflicts between labor and management, the ways that organizations handle or mishandle cases of domestic violence, and many other things. The writing that it published was, by turns, stylish, crude, sarcastic, earnest, goofy, and snarky, even verging on mean. But that brashness was often part of the point—these writers weren’t cultivating access. They weren’t trying to be liked by the people they wrote about. That included me: after I wrote a piece for Grantland that accompanied a documentary produced by ESPN, about the first pitch that President George W. Bush threw at Yankee Stadium after 9/11, the site published a piece criticizing the network’s whole production and called my role in it “craven.” I had been put “in the unenviable position of writing a story about George W. Bush without straightforwardly acknowledging that the man belongs in a prison,” the writer of the post, Tom Ley, concluded. But, however harsh Deadspin’s writers were about their subjects, they respected their readers and they respected their mission, which was to write about sports—and not only sports. Because why, if you wrote about sports, would you pretend that sports weren’t part of the wider world?

The Deadspin piece that reported on Maven’s plans had three authors: Laura Wagner, David Roth, and Kelsey McKinney. All three of them quit this past week. So did the rest of the staff. Whatever happens next, it seems likely that Deadspin will not, in a meaningful way, continue to exist.

The story of Deadspin’s demise is much weirder than the decline of Sports Illustrated, a legacy-media publication. Years ago, one of its sister sites, Gawker, published a piece about the sexual orientation of a billionaire, and that billionaire didn’t like the story; he later decided to fund a lawsuit filed by the former wrestler Hulk Hogan, who believed that Gawker, in another piece, which included an explicit video, had invaded his privacy. The case went on for years, and Hogan ultimately won, and, as a result, Gawker Media, the parent company of Gawker, Deadspin, and a handful of other sites, filed for bankruptcy. Gawker Media was sold to Univision, which rebranded it as Gizmodo Media Group and then sold it to the private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, which then renamed it G/O Media. Deadspin’s editorial staff immediately clashed with its most recent management; in August, the site published a long investigation into G/O Media’s hiring practices, corporate culture, and failures to guarantee editorial independence. Shortly after, the editor in chief, Megan Greenwell, resigned over disagreements with ownership, which she also laid out in a long post.