Fiktiv USA - Authentic Brands Group

Authentic Brands Group LLC (ABG) is a New York City-based brand management company. Its holdings include various apparel, athletics, and entertainment brands, for which it partners with other companies to license and merchandise. ABG owns more than 50 consumer brands, as well as the likeness rights and/or estates to a number of celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, Shaquille O'Neal, and Marilyn Monroe.

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Sports Illustrated (SI) is an American sports weekly magazine owned by Authentic Brands Group, and was first published in August 1954.

It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice. It is also known for its annual swimsuit issue, which has been published since 1964, and has spawned other complementary media works and products.

In 2018, the magazine was sold to Meredith Corporation by means of its acquisition of parent company Time Inc., but Meredith stated that it planned to sell Sports Illustrated as it did not align with its lifestyle properties. The following year, Meredith announced that it would sell Sports Illustrated to Authentic Brands Group. While Meredith initially planned to continue publishing its print and digital properties under license from ABG (who planned to leverage the Sports Illustrated brand in other markets), ABG later announced that it would instead give the publishing rights to theMaven, Inc.—a digital media company.

There were two magazines named Sports Illustrated before the current magazine began on August 9, 1954. In 1936, Stuart Scheftel created Sports Illustrated with a target market for sportsman. He published the magazine from 1936 to 1938 on a monthly basis. The magazine focused on golf, tennis, and skiing with articles on the major sports. He then sold the name to Dell Publications, which released Sports Illustrated in 1949 and this version lasted six issues before closing. Dell's version focused on major sports (baseball, basketball, boxing) and competed on magazine racks against Sport and other monthly sports magazines. During the 1940s these magazines were monthly and they did not cover the current events because of the production schedules. There was no large-base, general, weekly sports magazine with a national following on actual active events. It was then that Time patriarch Henry Luce began considering whether his company should attempt to fill that gap. At the time, many believed sports was beneath the attention of serious journalism and did not think sports news could fill a weekly magazine, especially during the winter. A number of advisers to Luce, including Life magazine's Ernest Havemann, tried to kill the idea, but Luce, who was not a sports fan, decided the time was right.

The goal of the new magazine was to be basically a magazine, but with sports. Many at Time-Life scoffed at Luce's idea; in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Luce and His Empire, W. A. Swanberg wrote that the company's intellectuals dubbed the proposed magazine "Muscle", "Jockstrap", and "Sweat Socks". Launched on August 9, 1954, it was not profitable (and would not be so for 12 years) and not particularly well run at first, but Luce's timing was good. The popularity of spectator sports in the United States was about to explode, and that popularity came to be driven largely by three things: economic prosperity, television, and Sports Illustrated.

The early issues of the magazine seemed caught between two opposing views of its audience. Much of the subject matter was directed at upper-class activities such as yachting, polo and safaris, but upscale would-be advertisers were unconvinced that sports fans were a significant part of their market.

After more than a decade of steady losses, the magazine's fortunes finally turned around in the 1960s when Andre Laguerre became its managing editor. A European correspondent for Time, Inc., who later became chief of the Time-Life news bureaux in Paris and London (for a time he ran both simultaneously), Laguerre attracted Henry Luce's attention in 1956 with his singular coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, which became the core of SI's coverage of those games. In May 1956, Luce brought Laguerre to New York to become the assistant managing editor of the magazine. He was named managing editor in 1960, and he more than doubled the circulation by instituting a system of departmental editors, redesigning the internal format, and inaugurating the unprecedented use in a news magazine of full-color photographic coverage of the week's sports events. He was also one of the first to sense the rise of national interest in professional football.

Laguerre also instituted the innovative concept of one long story at the end of every issue, which he called the "bonus piece". These well-written, in-depth articles helped to distinguish Sports Illustrated from other sports publications, and helped launch the careers of such legendary writers as Frank Deford, who in March 2010 wrote of Laguerre, "He smoked cigars and drank Scotch and made the sun move across the heavens ... His genius as an editor was that he made you want to please him, but he wanted you to do that by writing in your own distinct way".

Laguerre is also credited with the conception and creation of the annual Swimsuit Issue, which quickly became, and remains, the most popular issue each year.

In 1990, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to form the media conglomerate Time Warner. In 2014, Time Inc. was spun off from Time Warner. In November 2017, Meredith Corporation announced that it would acquire Time Inc., and the acquisition was completed in January 2018. However, in March 2018, Meredith stated that it would explore selling Sports Illustrated and several other former Time properties, arguing that they did not properly align with the company's lifestyle brands and publications.

On May 27, 2019, Authentic Brands Group announced its intent to acquire Sports Illustrated for $110 million. Authentic Brands Group will leverage its brand and other assets for new opportunities that "stay close to the DNA and the heritage of the brand." Upon announcement of the sale, it was stated that Meredith would enter into a licensing agreement to continue as publisher of the Sports Illustrated editorial operations for at least the next two years. However, on June 18, 2019, it was revealed that the rights to publish the Sports Illustrated editorial operations would be licensed to the digital media company theMaven, Inc. under a 10-year contract. On October 3, 2019, ABG and Meredith confirmed that the acquisition had closed.

Sports Illustrated is one of the most respected sports brands in the world. Each week, Sports Illustrated weaves words and images together to provide readers with the richest and deepest understanding of sport--what happened, why it happened and what will happen next. Sports Illustrated fuels the reader's passion by allowing him or her to experience the richness, complexity and emotion of sports on their own terms.

As one of the most recognized brand names in the US, Sports Illustrated represents the pinnacle of the world of sports. Each week, Sports Illustrated seeks to surprise, entertain and inform readers by covering sports with authority, vigor, immediacy and an enduring sense of humor. Readers continue to respond to Sports Illustrated and their passion for sports. They constantly relay their emotional involvement with the magazine and their enthusiasm for SI's fresh, vibrant, award-winning journalism. SI's loyalty is not to any athlete, team or league, but rather to the sports themselves.

Since 1954, Sports Illustrated magazine has annually presented the Sportsperson of the Year award to "the athlete or team whose performance that year most embodies the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement". Roger Bannister won the first-ever Sportsman of the Year award thanks to his record-breaking time of 3:59.4 for a mile (the first-ever time a mile had been run under four minutes). Both men and women have won the award, originally called "Sportsman of the Year" and renamed "Sportswoman of the Year" or "Sportswomen of the Year" when applicable; it is currently known as "Sportsperson of the Year."

In 2015, the magazine renamed its Sportsman Legacy Award to the Sports Illustrated's Muhammad Ali Legacy Award. The annual award was originally created in 2008 and honors former "sports figures who embody the ideals of sportsmanship, leadership and philanthropy as vehicles for changing the world".

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Sports Illustrated Kids (SI Kids, trademarked Sports Illustrated KIDS, sometimes Sports Illustrated for Kids) is a monthly spin-off of the weekly American sports magazine Sports Illustrated. SI Kids was launched in January 1989 and includes sports coverage with less vocabulary and more emphasis on humor. The magazine's secondary purpose is to market sports to children.

Monthly features include comics, humorous captions of athletics photos, child reporters, and player interviews.

The magazine's recurring mascot is Buzz Beamer, a buzz-cut blond-haired Caucasian boy always in dark glasses. He stars in most of the comics in which he plays a variety of sports and also appears in several flash cartoons on the official website. Buzz is created and drawn by award-winning cartoonist Bill Hinds.

The December edition of the magazine features the SportsKid of the Year.

Each issue features a poster that can be torn out of the issue.

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Sports Illustrated Teen (SI Teen, trademarked Sports Illustrated TEEN, sometimes Sports Illustrated TEEN Edition) is a bound multiple-page insert within regular monthly issues of SI Kids, written for the older readers of the children's magazine. Its contents feature more statistics, predictions, and in-depth looks at both team-based and extreme sports. Sports Illustrated Teen first appeared in the January 2004 issue.