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Sports Illustrated

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Sports Illustrated Magazine is a weekly sports magazine with a circulation over one million and has won the prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence not once but twice.

Two other magazines named Sports Illustrated were started in the 1930s and 1940s, but they both quickly failed. Following these events, there was no large-base general sports magazine with a national following. It was then that #pu#TIME#pu# 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 didn't think sports news could fill a weekly magazine, especially during the winter. A number of advisers to Luce, including #pu#Life Magazine#pu#'s Ernest Havemann, tried to kill the idea, but Luce, who was not a sports fan, decided the time was right.

After offering $200,000 in an unsuccessful bid to buy the name Sport for the new magazine, they acquired the rights to the name #pu#Sports Illustrated#pu# instead for just $10,000. The goal of the new magazine was to be "not a sports magazine, but the sports magazine." 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 16, 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.

The #pu#Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue#pu#, has been published since 1964, it is an annual publishing event that generates considerable interest and has a loyal following.

(parts of this description are excerpted, with permission, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_illustrated)

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