Sports Illustrated has inked a new deal with its star football writer, Peter King, for three years at more than $1 million annually.
The weekly is sweetening the deal with promises of launching a new football blog centered around King and supported by other, newly hired writers.
The move marks a big departure for Sports Illustrated and Time Inc., since the deal will involve not so much the SI brand but rather a single writer. The blog will be part of SI.com.
The signing means SI avoids getting another black eye as it did five and a half years ago when its reigning star, Rick Reilly, announced he was jumping to ESPN.
That multi-platform deal was reportedly worth $17 million over five years — making Reilly one of the highest-paid writers in the country.
The deal included heavy TV exposure on ESPN Sports Center and other segments — and eventually his TV workload forced him to abandon writing the biweekly column for ESPN The Magazine.
News also broke yesterday that Reilly has agreed to a new deal with ESPN.
“We’ll comment after his deal is signed,” said an ESPN spokesman.
The King deal was seen as a key contract for Time Inc., given all the recent turmoil, and it was not an easy one to nail down.
It is estimated to value between $1.2 million and $1.5 million annually, making him one of the highest-paid writers inside Time Inc. today.
Terry McDonell, the former editor of the SI Sports Group, had been unable to wrap up a new deal before he retired, leaving it for his successor, Paul Fichtenbaum, to hammer out.
The old contract expired Feb. 28 and King, a regular on NBC’s Sunday Night Football package, had been putting off negotiating a new deal until after the NFL season.
That had created a sense of unease among the brass who feared they might lose another star writer.
SI would not confirm the dollar amount.
“I did consider five media options, including ESPN, but it came down to NBC or SI and loyalty to a place that has been so good to me since 1989 helped to make my decision to stay,” said King, reached on vacation in London.
He is expected to continue his commentary on Sunday Night Football for NBC.
“It’s safe to say Peter is very nicely paid,” said Fichtenbaum.
Regarding the coming SI football site, “It’s still in the planning stages. Right now, we’re just calling it Peter’s site.” He said he hopes to have it up and running by the time football training camps open in August.
SI is getting ready to announce today a stable of other writers, including Boston Globe football writer Greg Bedard, and Giants reporter Jenny Vrentas from the Star-Ledger in Newark.
In addition, Brad Smith, who was most recently at the New York Times, will be the new director of photography for the sports group, replacing outgoing photo director Steve Fine, who was laid off in the January Time Inc. downsizing.
Neil Janowitz, from Fast Company, will be senior editor of SI.com, focusing on sports and pop culture.
No Alpha male
Now that Alpha Media has put Maxim magazine and its related websites on the block, industry veteran Jack Kliger is going to step away — he had been serving as an über consultant with the title of executive chairman.
“Our work is completed,” said Kliger, who was named to the high- ranking consultant gig in January 2012 and will wrap it up at the end of April.
Company President Ben Madden is staying on board.
“I’m planning to be here awhile,” said Madden. “If we partner with someone, I may be here for a long while. If it goes through the process and gets sold, it would be up to the new owners.”
Editor-in-Chief Dan Bova is also staying put.
Most industry sources are saying that the likely new partner would be a digital company looking to broaden its traffic numbers. Traditional print publishers seem unlikely to gamble on it.
The company had been taken over by a number of its one-time lenders led by Cerberus and Credit Suisse and the Oppenheimer Funds back in 2009 after the Quadrangle Group defaulted on its $100 million loan.
Quadrangle, which originally included Steve Rattner, Peter Ezersky and others, had taken it over in a $250 million sale from British publishing entrepreneur Felix Dennis, but the deal soured once the ad recession hit.
The one-time, high-flying magazine, the first of the so-called lad magazines featuring bawdy humor and racy photos of bikini-clad women, saw its circulation zoom quickly past the two million mark, but floundered as the economy teetered and many of the young men in the target 18-to-34 year-old audience turned to the Web.
The magazine, based on circulation, is still listed as the 17th-biggest in the US, at 2,284,034 — but the newsstand portion of that tumbled 19 percent, to 161,499.
The company over the past years has been ramping up its digital offerings.
The company is believed to have been marginally unprofitable last year but is said to be posting a profit in early 2013.