A global crisis? International perspectives on the state of print sport media

With losses in advertising, readership, and prestige, the decaying state of news media in the US has become such a well-known fact that even works of drama feature it as a plot point (Sepinwall, 2012). After enjoying a prominent place in the societal firmament for decades, print sports media in the US experienced a precipitous decline in recent years. With the demise in the early 1990s of the short-lived National Sports Daily, there have been no print US sports dailies distributed nationally. The country’s two main print sports magazines, Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine, each regularly report circulations of approximately two million (Friedman, 2010), but this figure is possibly aided by various subscription discounts available to consumers.