NEW YORK, NY — After sending a company-wide email to notify all of its staff that they were being laid off, a top executive at iconic publication Sports Illustrated contemplated how things turned out so wrong as he stood in front of framed covers of obese and trans swimsuit models.
"I just don't know where things went south," said Jack Weber. "Did we not get woke enough? Should we have featured trans models even earlier? Was the heavy woman we put on the cover not heavy enough? What was it? Maybe we should've given more consideration to plastering the Pride flag on our cover back in June. I was certain we signaled the appropriate amount of virtue for every possible cause and movement out there. It just makes no sense."
The magazine, long seen as the authoritative source for all sports news, finally cut loose all its workforce after realizing no one was reading the publication anymore. "This really threw us for a loop," Weber said. "We had so many big things planned to turn things around. A salute to Caitlyn Jenner. Naming Lia Thomas our Female Athlete of the Year. We were even in negotiations to have Lizzo as a special celebrity cover model for the swimsuit issue this year. Now, all of that will be lost."
At publishing time, Sports Illustrated announced it had found a new solution to its problems by hiring an entirely new staff that would be the most diverse and inclusive in the history of sports news publications.
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