A week after Sports Illustrated was hit by an embarrassing artificial intelligence scandal, the company’s newest leader is enacting legislation for new employees.
Manoj Bhargava, the owner of 5 Hour Energy Drinks, who bought a controlling stake in Sports Illustrated operator Arena Group earlier this year, revealed himself in a meandering video call with Arena staff Wednesday afternoon. I made an introduction.
The call was preceded by a reshuffle at the top of SI and Arena Group, with Arena COO Andrew Craft and Media President Rob Barrett exiting. Sources told Front Office Sports that in the call, Bhargava claimed he had control over publications and other media under the Arena banner.
“Nobody matters,” Mr. Bhargava told his staff, according to a source who attended the presentation. “I’m not important. …The amount of waste you all waste is astounding.”
The meeting lasted for over 90 minutes and Bhargava joked at one point. [Energy drink]? ”
Other highlights of Bhargava’s comments at City Hall include:
- The rant that recycling is “useless.”
- “You need to stop doing this stupid thing,” he told his employees.
- He declared that “PowerPoint is illegal” because such presentations are a waste of time.
TAG told Front Office Sports in a statement: “Today, Manoj conducted a virtual town hall where he spoke with Arena Group staff and took questions. Also today, several adjustments have been made to the business to improve efficiency and profitability, and senior management Some changes have been made.”
TAG senior vice president of growth Matthew Lombardi is expected to have an expanded role in the new structure, people told FOS. Lombardi’s sports news aggregator website, The Spun, was acquired by TAG in 2021.
Katie Kulik, who was named TAG’s chief revenue officer last month, will lead the business side of SI, according to people familiar with the matter.
SI and TAG are still dealing with the fallout from last week’s bombshell report by Futurism, which claims the venerable journalism organization used artificial intelligence to write product reviews and fabricated bylines and headshots.
Bhargava agreed to acquire a majority stake in TAG in August, giving his Simplify Inventions a roughly 65% stake in the company. In return, TAG earned him a $50 million investment and a $60 million advertising contract over five years from a collection of consumer brands owned by Simplify.
“As with most companies in the media world, the wider our reach, the more opportunity we have,” TAG CEO Ross Levinson said of the deal at the time. “This dramatically accelerates our path to becoming a diversified media company with great brands.”
Meanwhile, SI has had to weather a storm of negative headlines regarding its alleged use of AI. TAG placed the blame on a third-party company called AdVon Commerce, and said through a spokesperson:
“AdVon assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans. However, to protect the privacy of authors, AdVon may not allow writers to use pens or pseudonyms on certain articles. This is behavior we do not condone, and we are removing the content while an internal investigation continues, and we have since terminated our partnership.”
A source told FOS that Bhargava did not mention the Futurist article’s allegations at City Hall. Additionally, another source told FOS that the timing of Futurism’s talk is unrelated to Arena executives’ departure.
The Sports Illustrated Union, which represents the magazine’s reporters, issued a statement last week saying its members were “horrified” by the report and called for “answers and transparency” from the parent company.
“If true, these actions violate everything we believe about journalism,” the union said. “We regret that we were involved in such a disrespectful act towards our readers.”
SI, which has been in business for 69 years, has suffered from repeated restructuring and layoffs, including TAG’s layoff of 17 employees in February, and has struggled to transition from print to digital.
In 2019, Authentic acquired SI and leased its publishing rights to TAG (also known as Maven) shortly after the deal.