For a generation of British fans the week had a shape. The games were played on a Sunday in America, the highlights arrived on Channel 4 about a week later, and in between there was the paper. If you wanted to know who had been cut, who had been traded, or what had happened in a game you would not see for days, you waited for it to reach the newsagent.
That world has gone so completely that it is hard to remember it was ever normal. Today every snap of every game can be watched live on a phone, and a trade is reported to millions of people before the players involved have been told. The question this piece sets out to answer is what happened to the printed page in between: who closed, who moved online, who filled the gap, and whether there is still a place for something that comes out once a week. It is not an idle question for the magazine you are reading.
Thursday’s paper
Britain’s American football press grew out of the Channel 4 boom of the mid-1980s. The coverage was generous by the standards of the day and thin by ours: one game a week, an hour of highlights, shown long after the result was known in America. Neil Reynolds, now the best-known voice of the sport on British television, remembers it as “watching one-hour highlights on Channel 4 one week after the games are played.”
The print titles filled what television left out. There were monthlies, and there was a weekly newspaper. “I grew up with Gridiron Magazine, Touchdown, First Down,” Reynolds said in 2019. The Gridiron he means is the 1980s monthly, not the current title of the same name. First Down was the weekly, the paper of record for a British fan who wanted transactions, results and depth charts rather than an hour of edited highlights.
Reynolds’s own career traces the arc of this story. “I did some work experience for First Down in 1991,” he recalled, and he was “a full time writer for First Down from ’97 to 2000.” Then he went to work for the league itself, from 2000 to 2006. The writer went from the weekly paper to the governing body’s own media operation, which is where a great deal of NFL journalism has been heading ever since.
First Down lasted longer than most people remember. It was still going well into the 2000s, and the Sports Journalists’ Association recorded its end plainly in 2013: “Since 2007, when First Down closed, there has not been an American Football publication in the UK.” For six years Britain had no printed magazine of its own about the sport.
The American shelf empties
In the United States the same thing happened on a larger scale, and the casualties were bigger names.
Pro Football Weekly was the closest American equivalent to First Down. It was founded by Arthur Arkush, and its publisher, Hub Arkush, said the first issue “rolled off the press in late August of 1967.” It was, as Ed Sherman wrote in the Chicago Tribune when it closed, an iconic brand of the NFL’s great boom in the 1970s and 1980s. On the night of 31 May 2013 Arkush announced that it was finished: “There comes a time when there is just no more money to lose, and now we are forced to close the doors.” The company’s deficit ran to more than $8 million.
A week later he told the media writer Ed Sherman what had gone wrong. The publication had tried an app and video, and the audience had come. The money had not. “The initial projection was that we would get 40-60 percent in paid apps. Well, 98 percent were free. People will pay for games, but not content.” His verdict on the whole category was blunter still.
“We’re no different than The Sporting News or Newsweek. The weekly print model doesn’t work.”
The Sporting News, which he named, had gone six months earlier. Founded in 1886, it printed its last regular issue on 13 December 2012 and became a digital publication from the new year. Its editor, Garry Howard, gave the reason in a sentence that could stand for the whole industry: “By the time the magazine comes out, it’s almost obsolete.” He added that the subscription base had been dwindling, “and I think a lot of that had to do with people wanting their information updated now.”
The biggest name of all did not close, but it shrank. “Once a weekly publication, Sports Illustrated was reduced to biweekly publishing in 2018 and became a monthly in 2020,” as the Associated Press summarised it in January 2024, the week its publisher lost the licence to the brand and announced mass layoffs. A new publisher, Minute Media, took over that spring and kept the print edition going.
ESPN The Magazine, launched in 1998 as a glossy rival to Sports Illustrated, printed its last regular issue in September 2019. ESPN’s statement was frank about why. “Consumer habits are evolving rapidly, and this requires ESPN to evolve as well,” it said. “Our data shows the vast majority of readers already consume our print journalism on digital platforms.”
Even the league’s own reference books left the shelf. The NFL Record and Fact Book, the annual brick of numbers that every serious fan and every press box once owned, was last sold as a paperback in 2014. From 2015 the league put the whole thing online, all 851 pages, as a free download. The official rulebook went the same way, and now lives on the league’s football operations website.
Not quite everything vanished. The pre-season annuals survive, because they are bought once a year by people who want something to keep. A Sporting News Pro Football yearbook was on sale in American shops this summer at $14.99, and Lindy’s published a 2026 pro football preview. What died was the weekly, the publication whose whole purpose was to bring you the news.
A lawyer in West Virginia
The gap was filled, at first, by amateurs.
In 2001 an employment lawyer in Bridgeport, West Virginia, called Mike Florio started a website called ProFootballTalk. Sports Illustrated profiled him in 2007, by which point his daily rumour mill was being read inside the league and in press boxes across the country. Florio’s explanation of his method was simple: “I write what I would want to read if I were the reader.” He drew a line that the industry would later blur: “We don’t report rumors as hard news.”
In 2009 NBC came calling. Florio has said that he did not want the deal, and that he told the network so: “I tried to scare him away.” His description of NBC at the time says a great deal about where the old broadcasters stood. It was, he said, “woefully behind its competitors on the dot com side.” NBC took his site on under licence, with Florio keeping ownership and control, and by the end of 2010 comScore’s figures, as NBC quoted them, put ProFootballTalk’s traffic up 450 per cent. A blog started in a spare room had become part of a television network’s NFL coverage.
The broadcasters’ answer to the internet was not to compete with it from outside but to buy into it and build their own. ESPN built its news operation around insiders, reporters whose job was to break transactions first, and moved its best-known magazine online. The league did the same. NFL Network went on air in November 2003 and NFL.com became a newsroom, which meant that a large share of the news about the NFL was now being reported by people employed by the NFL.
That arrangement has never been comfortable, and in 2025 it became more tangled still. ESPN agreed to take over NFL Network, and in return the league took a 10 per cent stake in ESPN. When the deal closed this year, ESPN’s head of content, Burke Magnus, was asked how the network would cover a league that now partly owned it. His answer was unusually honest.
“We’re going to cover and report the NFL, it’s called the NFL Network. But we’re not going to investigate the NFL.” The investigating, he said, would be left to ESPN’s other platforms.
The content farm and the chequebook
Two other models grew up in the space the weeklies left, and they could hardly have been more different.
The first was Bleacher Report, which began in the mid-2000s as a site written largely by unpaid fans and grew by mastering search engines. In 2012 the Columbia Journalism Review called it “a content farm engineered to get search engine visits with lowest common denominator clickbait.” The slideshow, ten reasons this and twelve players that, clicked through a page at a time to show more adverts, was its signature. Turner Broadcasting bought the company that summer for a reported $175 million, which told everyone else in the industry what the market valued.
The second was The Athletic, founded in 2016 on the opposite bet: that people would pay a subscription for serious reporting with no slideshows and no clickbait. Its co-founder, Alex Mather, set out its ambitions in 2017 in words that the newspaper industry has never forgotten: “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing.” Five years later The New York Times bought The Athletic for $550 million, and in 2023 the Times closed its own sports department and handed its sports coverage to its new purchase. As Bryan Curtis put it in The Ringer: “The Athletic didn’t preside over the death of newspapers. It became one.”
The lesson of the two is the same. Free coverage paid for by advertising rewarded volume and speed. Paid coverage, once enough people were willing to subscribe, rewarded depth. The weekly print paper sat between the two and was squeezed out by both.
Thirty seconds
What the internet did to the news itself was to remove the week. There is no longer a news cycle in the old sense, a day or a week in which events are gathered, checked and set down. There is a feed, and it never stops.
The NFL’s insiders are the clearest product of that change. Ian Rapoport, now of ESPN, was asked this year whether being first still matters. “I do see the value in it because if you’re first, it gets more clicks,” he said. “Even if you’re just 30 seconds before, you’re probably the guy that gets credit.”
Speed has costs, and the industry has paid some of them in public. In 2011 Adam Schefter sent a draft story to Bruce Allen, then running Washington’s football operation, for approval, signing off: “Thanks, Mr. Editor, for that and the trust.” When the email came out a decade later he apologised: “It was a step too far and, looking back, I shouldn’t have done it.” In January 2022 ESPN reported that Tom Brady was retiring. His father said that anybody claiming he had decided “is absolutely wrong.” Brady announced his retirement three days later. The story was right; it had simply run ahead of the man it was about. And in January this year, when Baltimore parted with John Harbaugh, Rapoport reported one reason and Schefter said on air that he did not think the information “could be any less true.” Both were among the best-sourced reporters in the sport. A reader had no way of knowing which to believe.
Then came the machines. In November 2023 Sports Illustrated was found to have published articles under the names of writers who did not appear to exist, with profile pictures that turned up on a site selling AI-generated headshots. The magazine’s own union said that if the reports were true, “these practices violate everything we believe in about journalism.” Within two months its publisher had lost the licence to the brand, over an unpaid licence fee, and announced mass layoffs. By mid-2024 the media watchdog NewsGuard had counted 966 websites publishing mostly AI-generated news.
None of this means the internet has made NFL coverage worse. A British fan in 2026 has access to more good reporting, more film analysis and more data than any fan in 1990 could have imagined, most of it free. The problem is not scarcity. It is the opposite: the good material is scattered across team sites, insiders’ feeds, podcasts, newsletters and video channels, mixed in with a great deal that is not good at all, and nobody puts it in order. The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that 46 per cent of people in the UK sometimes or often avoid the news altogether. A firehose is not the same thing as being informed.
Meanwhile, in Britain
For six years after First Down closed, Britain had no printed American football magazine. The silence was broken in 2013 from two directions. That summer the American annual Lindy’s Pro Football published a British edition with a 16-page insert for fans here. And a 21-year-old journalist at the Press Association called Matthew Sherry launched a magazine called Gridiron.
When Sherry announced it, his reason for starting was the same complaint that runs through this whole story. The coverage existed, but it was scattered: in Britain, he said, “there is no go-to U.K.-based site with NFL content.” His first issue went on sale on 28 August 2013, as a digital edition only, at £3, with no promise of a second unless enough people bought the first. They did. Gridiron has now published more than ninety issues and is still going in 2026. Its rhythm has changed over the years: it has been described as a monthly running from August to May, and it now publishes four print editions a season, from August to the draft, with three digital-only editions in between and a series of shorter digital specials. It describes itself as the UK’s only regular NFL magazine, and for most of its life that has been true.
What Britain has not had since First Down is a weekly. The case against one is the case Arkush made in 2013 and the one Howard made at The Sporting News: by the time it arrives, the news is old. That argument is correct about news. The question is whether news is still what a weekly is for.
The slow read
There is evidence, small but real, that some readers have started to want the opposite of the feed.
Delayed Gratification, a British quarterly launched at the start of 2011, built itself on the idea of reporting events months after they happened, once the dust had settled, and has run for close to fifteen years without advertising. Its editor, Rob Orchard, calls it “either a very slow magazine or a fast history book”, and puts the case for it simply: “As humans, we are not very good at processing relentlessly depressing information.” When Saturday Comes, the football monthly that began as a fanzine in 1986, still sells an average of 12,365 copies an issue, every one of them paid for and four in five to subscribers. Mundial, the football quarterly, was rescued in 2022 by a company whose executive described its appeal in a phrase that could serve as a manifesto: “In a world of digital content served in a feed then gone forever, Mundial offers an antidote.”
None of these is a news publication. All of them sell the thing the feed cannot: a finished object. Someone has decided what matters, put it in order, checked it and stopped. A reader can get to the end of it.
Where a weekly fits
Hub Arkush was right that the weekly print model, as a way of delivering news, does not work. No paper can beat a phone to a trade. The Grid does not try to. By the time this issue reaches you on a Tuesday morning every result in it has been on a screen somewhere since Sunday night or the small hours of Tuesday itself.
What a weekly can still do is the part the internet has made harder rather than easier. It can take a week of scattered reporting, from team sites, agencies, local papers, data feeds and the league’s own releases, and turn it into one account that has been checked, put in order and finished. It can say which of two contradictory insiders turned out to be right. It can tell a reader what a game meant, and not only what happened in it. It can be read in one sitting, by someone who does not want to spend their week in a feed.
Is the demand already there, or does a magazine like this one have to create it? The honest answer is a little of both. Britain sustained a weekly American football paper for the best part of twenty years when there was no other way to follow the sport. Gridiron has shown for thirteen more that British fans will pay for a magazine of their own. And the evidence from the slow-journalism titles suggests that the more fragmented the news becomes, the more some readers value somebody doing the sorting for them. That market will never be the size of the feed. It does not need to be.
Thirty years ago the weekly paper existed because the news was scarce. If it has a future, it will be because the news is everywhere, and a reader still wants someone to make sense of it once a week.
Sources: Neil Reynolds, Pigskin Books interview (Shane Richmond), 14 December 2019, and Decyfr Sport (Charlie Liptrott), 23 June 2023; Sports Journalists’ Association, 14 August 2013, for First Down’s closure and Lindy’s UK edition; Hub Arkush’s farewell notice and his interview with Ed Sherman, The Sherman Report, 1 and 6 June 2013; Awful Announcing (Brad Gagnon), 3 June 2013, for Pro Football Weekly’s debts; NPR, 11 December 2012, and Greg Collard, WFAE, 11 December 2012, for The Sporting News; Joe Reedy, Associated Press, 19 January 2024, and AP, 18 March 2024, for Sports Illustrated; Chad Finn, Boston.com, 30 April 2019, for ESPN The Magazine; InfoDocket, August 2015, and NFL Football Operations for the Record and Fact Book and the rulebook; Don Crim, Muddy River Sports, 27 July 2026, for this year’s Sporting News annual; Sports Illustrated, 17 December 2007, for Mike Florio; Barrett Media, 11 March 2022, and Front Office Sports (A.J. Perez), 7 September 2023, for the NBC deal; Sports Video Group, 21 December 2010, for ProFootballTalk’s traffic; Pro Football Hall of Fame, 3 November 2023, for NFL Network; Awful Announcing, 5 August 2025, and Associated Press, 2026, for the ESPN-NFL deal; John Mamola, Barrett Media, 3 June 2026, for Burke Magnus; Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review, 5 October 2012, and TechCrunch, 6 August 2012, for Bleacher Report; Bryan Curtis, The Ringer, 7 January 2022, and the Associated Press, 10 July 2023, for The Athletic and The New York Times; Brandon Contes, Awful Announcing, 20 February 2026, for Ian Rapoport; Kerry Flynn, CNN Business, 13 October 2021, for Adam Schefter; CBS Boston, 29 January 2022, and the Nashua Telegraph, 1 February 2022, for the Brady story; Jimmy Traina, Sports Illustrated, 8 January 2026, for the Harbaugh reports; Associated Press, Awful Announcing and the Poynter Report, November 2023 and January 2024, for Sports Illustrated’s AI articles; The Decoder, 6 July 2024, for NewsGuard; Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette, 17 June 2025, for the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report; Noah Davis, Grantland, 22 August 2013, Sounds Profitable, 20 May 2024, Magzter and Gridiron’s own website, for Gridiron; Caroline Scott, journalism.co.uk, 27 March 2018, for Rob Orchard; When Saturday Comes media information 2026; John Glenday, The Drum, 28 February 2022, for Mundial.
Printed in Issue 13 of The Grid and released free on 3 November 2026. The text is exactly as it appeared in the magazine.