A-Rod’s mitts on SI?
Rumors have him eyeing mag buy
RUMORS were swirling this week that former Yankee slugger and steroid cheat Alex Rodriguez is in the hunt to buy Sports Illustrated.
Ironically, it was an SI story back in 2009 that initially blew the lid off A-Rod’s steroid use in 2003 while he was still with the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez was suspended for the entire 2014 Yankee season for alleged steroid use.
In retirement, Rodriguez has worked to rehab his image and is a current ESPN sportscaster.
A spokesman for A-Rod did not returned a call by press time. At the moment, his interest falls into the category of fast-spreading rumor. If it’s true, he’d most likely be heading a coalition of backers.
Meredith, which put SI as well as Fortune, Money and Time magazines on the block in March following its $2.8 billion acquisition of Time Inc., was reportedly looking for $200 million for SI.
The onetime weekly title,, which was estimated to have earned $13 million to $15 million last year, cut its frequency to every other week this year.
But sources think the protracted negotiations over a sale mean one thing: The price is dropping.
Josh Harris, a co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, reportedly said that his $125 million was rejected. The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein and the William Morris Endeavor talent agency also looked and passed.
Former NBA star Junior Bridgeman is still believed to be in the hunt. Now running the Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Company, he did not return a call for comment. But on Aug. 5, he told the Louisville Courier-Journal that he was looking at SI and that he felt the $125 million bid by Harris “was not going to get it done.”
One financial source said Bridgeman is “still on the table” but is “having trouble coming up with the financing.”
Also said to still be in the hunt is motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who is teaming up with Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, filmmaker Josh Pollack and several others.
Timber!
The International Trade Commission is going to vote at 11 a.m. Wednesday to decide whether the subsidized newsprint being imported from Canada is harming US mills — or whether the general economic malaise that is walloping newspapers everywhere is responsible for mill closings in the US.
North Pacific Paper Co., a mill in Longview, Wash., that employs about 400, filed the original complaint last year, which initially resulted in a tariff of 22 percent being slapped on Canadian paper produc
ers. That, in turn, caused the price to spike by close to 30 percent for the hardpressed newspaper industry here. In an Aug. 2 ruling, the Commerce Department cut the tariffs but did not repeal them entirely. “We weren’t seeking an advantage, but a level playing field against subsidized, unfairly traded uncoated groundwood paper from Canada,” said a spokesman for NORPAC. He said 10 mills have shut down in the US since 2012. “Those closures have everything to do with the shift from print to digital, not pricing from Canadian imports,” counters Paul Boyle, a spokesman for the News Media Alliance, an umbrella group fighting the tariffs. He also says papers in the Northeast are not going to use paper from Washington state. “The newsprint market is an east and west business, not north and south. In other words, NORPAC does not sell into the East, and eastern Cana- dian mills do not sell into the West,” he said.
Since the tariffs went into effect, NORPAC has hired 60 more people and plans to hire another 40, Boyle said.
If the tariffs stay, publishers will take further measures to cut paper use. That move will hurt demand from US mills that the tariffs are designed to protect.