Longtime Sports Illustrated writer says sports media moving away from Google, SEO

The sports media business keeps changing, and one longtime Sports Illustrated writer says the days of building everything around Google and SEO may be fading fast.

Jimmy Traina, who recently left SI after more than two decades, explained his decision during an appearance with John Ourand on Puck’s The Varsity podcast.

As relayed by Tyler Lauletta of Awful Announcing, Traina said part of the decision was simply the grind of producing a daily sports-media column, something he’d been doing five days a week since 2007. But there was more to it than that.

“The days of trying to get Google search, SEO, headlines, those days are over,” Traina said. “There’s other revenue streams now. Live events, watchalongs, stuff like that.”

Traina is joining Underscore Media, where he’ll host three podcasts per week and write two newsletters. He also pointed specifically to YouTube, TikTok and Reels as areas where sports-media companies increasingly need to be.

That’s certainly become true around the NBA. The league itself has entered its new broadcasting era with NBC, ESPN and Amazon, while coverage has increasingly moved beyond traditional stories and columns and into podcasts, YouTube shows, social-media clips and direct-to-consumer newsletters.

Traina said he’d wanted to move away from writing five days a week for roughly two years, adding that producing a worthwhile column every morning isn’t quite as easy as it might appear.

“If you cover the NFL, yeah, you can probably write five days a week in your sleep,” he said. “But there’s not sports media news every single day.”

On an August Monday, NBA writers everywhere probably understand the feeling.