All My Friends Know The Slow Writer: Contextualization, Explanation, Fairness and Equity in Sports Illustrated’s Daily Cover

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sports Illustrated has a long legacy of respected longform journalism and a well-documented history of oversexualizing female athletes and underrepresenting women’s sports. In March 2020, the magazine launched the Daily Cover, a daily digital investigative or feature article emailed to subscribers and displayed prominently on SI.com. Given the magazine’s overall focus on digital journalism and breaking news, the Daily Cover provides an ideal opportunity to examine this generation of “bonus piece” journalism through the lens of slow journalism. Slow journalism emphasizes fairness, goodness and contextualization, reflecting a commitment to underserved communities and activist journalism. Quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the 244 Daily Cover stories in the first year found a qualitative commitment to slow journalism tenets - disconnecting from the hustle of breaking news; focusing on contextualization; and explaining prominent and uncommonly discussed topics for a community, not just an audience. While women’s sports were covered infrequently and less than a quarter of reporters were women and non-binary journalists—though that number is higher than the percentage of women in sports media—the overall sample reflected slow journalism principles of fairness, goodness, and balance.