Ross Levinsohn’s steady hand turns Sports Illustrated around.

Sports Illustrated, a Playboy-branded magazine, has received much criticism and disapproval from critics. In 2011 the magazine was in dire straits with an $89 million deficit and sales at their lowest in history. Then they got Ross Levinsohn as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

Sports Illustrated CEO Ross Levinsohn is beginning to turn things around for Sports Illustrated. He took over the summer of 2012, only four months after taking his new position. “Sports Illustrated has been losing an average of $16 million annually since 2008,” Levinsohn said. “And that’s not what we do here. So we’ve had to pivot from the business model and create a new one.”

The first thing that Levinsohn did was make some administrative changes. He replaced the magazine’s CEO Michael Loeb with himself. Second, he let go of several editors and writers. Once these changes were in place, Levinsohn was free to change the current layout and focus of the magazine.

Sports Illustrated’s chairman said that Levinsohn was “the first person in a long time who could see this wasn’t just about economics but about reinventing our brand into a broader lifestyle publication.”

Sports Illustrated needed to reinvent itself to survive, and to do that, Levinsohn took a lot of the criticism from some former employees on himself and made changes. “We were just inefficient,” he said. “I believe it’s a problem we will solve now.”

There needs to be more evidence to suggest the changes made by Sports Illustrated CEO Levinsohn are working. In a post on June 19, 2016, the financial magazine stated that Sports Illustrated’s revenue dropped by 33% and said, “Levinsohn has been fighting for big changes at Sports Illustrated for a year and a half now. He’s tried to bring in new content, such as more profiles of athletes and celebrities who appear on the cover. Levinsohn also has revamped the magazine’s layout and tried to entice advertisers with a new version of Sports Illustrated for Girls.”