When ESPN The Magazine burst onto the scene 21 years ago, the swaggering declaration that our four original cover stars were Next was as much about calling our own shot as it was about bestowing the label on those young athletes.
From Day 1, the vision was clear: Game stories were (literally) yesterday’s news, and game-action images were supporting material only. This magazine was all about offering fans insider access and incomparable insight into the lives and stories of the very real people behind the scores and stats we all follow so obsessively from season to season. The impact was immediate. As a new generation of athletes — from LeBron and Serena to Brady, Phelps and Tiger – claimed dominance, so too did ESPN The Magazine. In our two-plus decades, we’ve won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (our industry’s best picture Oscar) three times, earned Folio’s first-ever Magazine of the Year accolade in 2018 and garnered literally hundreds of written and visual journalism awards over the years. In the process, we claimed the largest audience of any magazine in the country and set the standard for a generation of sports media.
A big part of the fun was embracing the creative playground of our format, crafting story packages that meant the physical turn of a page would surprise and delight a reader every time. The oversized pages of this magazine made photographs POP. And our covers. Oh, the covers: Michael Jordan’s farewell in 1998 — and the Derek Jeter farewell cover that echoed it in 2014. Ricky Williams in that wedding dress in 1999. Ninja, our very first esports athlete, on the cover and reverberating through the culture just last year. Every single Body cover, but especially the very first one: Serena Williams.
There came a time, however, when the format itself began to limit. Franchises born on these pages, from Next to World Fame 100 to Heroes to Body, found their greatest impact across digital and social, their stories brought to life best by the combined power of words and images, video and interactivity across all our platforms. We found ourselves itching to release big stories not on an increasingly arcane publication schedule but when a story was ready and needed to be out in the world. And advertising moved out of print and into other spaces. With all of that in mind, we made the difficult decision to end the printing of ESPN The Magazine with the issue you hold in your hands.
Still, while endings are always bittersweet, the punctuation mark on the end of The Mag’s print run brings freedom and excitement too. The commitment to deeply reported and powerfully told magazine-style journalism at ESPN continues — now with the full flexibility to publish those pieces when timing and relevance demand them. The editorial “events” we have become known for will continue as well, but with the unconstrained opportunity to imagine what those ideas need to be, across every platform ESPN touches.
Next month — a full 692 covers and 961 cover athletes after that very first issue we published in 1998 — we embrace our mission anew with the launch of ESPN Cover Story. Inspired by those most impactful magazine pieces, our biggest story each month will feature signature photography and the creation of an original ESPN poster-style cover, along with both long-form written and television pieces, produced at the highest level. And it will all travel across ESPN TV shows, social channels and on the ESPN App in true cover-story fashion – the featured athlete’s story will own the day. Sound utopian? Fantastical? A little hard to imagine just yet? So was the creative vision of ESPN The Magazine two decades ago. That world didn’t yet realize that sports media was ripe for reimagining, but when we did it, we set the bar for the whole industry to follow. Our challenge now is no more and no less, so we’re calling our shot here, today, as we did then: We got Next.
With gratitude for the privilege of having begun my editing career at this magazine, and for the honor of leading this team these past three and a half years,
Alison Overholt