The owner of Sports Illustrated said it had chosen a new company to publish the magazine, a deal that could settle some of the recent friction at the storied publication and continue the print edition.
Authentic Brands Group, which owns the intellectual property rights to Sports Illustrated as well as to celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali, said it had struck a long-term deal to license Sports Illustrated’s publishing rights to Minute Media, a digital-media company focused on sports.
Minute Media’s license with Sports Illustrated will stretch for 10 years with an option to extend for up to 30 years total, into the magazine’s centenary. Both companies expect the deal, which also includes Sports Illustrated’s Swim brand, to last for the full 30-year term. The companies declined to disclose financial terms but said that Authentic Brands Group was taking a stake in Minute Media as part of the deal.
The deal is a significant expansion for Minute Media, a New York-based company founded in 2011 whose holdings — which include the sports websites The Players’ Tribune and Fansided — generate more than $400 million in revenue annually.
Sports Illustrated has been engulfed in turmoil for months, the result of a corporate tug of war between the company that owns the iconic magazine and the energy drink mogul whose executives have been running it. The agreement begins immediately and effectively wrests Sports Illustrated’s operations away from Arena Group, the digital-media company that has run the magazine since 2019 and threatened to end its print edition.
A spokesman for Arena Group said the company had been informed of the deal with the new licensee and had no other details.
It is a new chapter for Sports Illustrated, which published its first issue in 1954. Asaf Peled, the chief executive of Minute Media, said in an interview that he planned to continue Sports Illustrated’s print edition.
“In the current era of digital, it’s still not trivial and quite difficult to build your own brand and get people to know and admire it,” Mr. Peled said. “So once you get the opportunity to work with and grow an iconic brand like Sports Illustrated, you take it.”
Sports Illustrated has been in a state of limbo for months. In January, Authentic Brands Group terminated Arena Group’s license to operate the magazine after the company missed a $3.75 million licensing payment. That month, Arena Group — which continued to run Sports Illustrated while it was in breach of its licensing agreement — told Sports Illustrated employees that many would be laid off and notified others that they would remain on staff for 90 days. Last week, Arena Group executives told employees they would stop printing the magazine after its May issue.
Minute Media plans to expand the magazine’s publishing operations globally, Mr. Peled said, and to hire back some of the employees whom Arena Group had laid off. He added that he would not know how many employees would return until Minute Media started operating the business this week.
Mr. Peled said Minute Media was focused on “short-form sports content creation,” making video, audio and text for consumption on mobile devices. It owns Fansided, which features articles and podcasts for sports fans and for several years was owned by Sports Illustrated’s former publisher, Time Inc.; and The Players’ Tribune, which publishes videos and essays by athletes and was founded by Derek Jeter, the Yankees Hall of Fame shortstop. Mr. Peled said he also wanted to continue Sports Illustrated’s tradition of in-depth journalism.
“It’s an exception to our core strategy, but it’s not the first time we’ve done that,” Mr. Peled said.
