Steve Jobs Said Sports Illustrated’s Tablet Demo Was “Really Stupid” — But Didn’t Mean It

Several months before Apple unveiled the iPad in January 2010, editors from Time, Inc., including some from Sports Illustrated, met with Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs to get a preview of the soon-to-be-released tablet. The venerable sports magazine was already planning a tablet version and had even cooked up a video (above) that demonstrated what Sports Illustrated could look like on a full-color, Internet-connected tablet device that readers could touch, swipe and rotate.

One Time Inc. employee asked Jobs what he thought of the video.

“I think it’s really, really stupid,” Jobs said.

“We were all kind of sad,” Terry McDonell, editor of Time Inc. Sports Group, recounted on stage at Mashable‘s Media Summit Friday morning. “It was not stupid, though. In fact, it anticipated everything he was doing.”

Later that day, McDonnell got a call from someone at Apple. “Steve wanted you to know that was pretty much a negotiation tactic,” he said.

It looks like Sports Illustrated had gotten it right after all.

And, as we’ve explored previously, Sport Illustrated‘s editors have continued to innovate aggressively in the tablet space ever since. The magazine has produced a digital edition for the iPad every week since it debuted last June, and has rolled out weekly editions for the Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Nook Color and HP TouchPad in more recent months.

Sports Illustrated also produces daily content for SI.com, highlights 10 sports photos every day on its Chrome web app, and offers more content on one-off apps and in special cross-channel packages, including Swimsuit.

“We used to do 3,500 pages per year,” McDonell recalled on stage. “Now we do more than 100,000 pages, maybe 200,000 if you count different aspect ratios and slideshows as pages.”

That’s impressive, especially given that the magazine hasn’t staffed up significantly. Instead, McDonell said, Sports Illustrated‘s departments have become better integrated and its staff is working harder. SI‘s web operations, once exiled to an office in Atlanta, have been brought to headquarters. Ninety-five percent of writers produce content for both the web and print, filing short news pieces for the web while building out longer, weekly pieces for the print and tablet editions.

The strategy appears to be paying off: Sports Illustrated‘s digital revenue was up 22% between 2009 and 2010, and it is on track for double-digit growth again this year, according to Scott Novak, VP of communications at Sports Illustrated Group. Digital now accounts for 30% of overall revenue, said McDonell. Print generates 55%, and other marketing efforts bring in 15%.

That isn’t to say Sports Illustrated hasn’t made mistakes. Its first digital editions were oversized and cluttered with too-many add-ons, McDonell admitted on stage — what he dubs the “Swiss Army Knife Trap.”

“We’ve had to be hard on ourselves about what we’re going to put in [the tablet editions]. We have to think about what [additional features] will actually do for someone,” he explained.

McDonell said he and his team are now working on developing a “second-screen dashboard” designed to be used while watching sports on TV. He suggested that social media and gaming elements would play a large role in that dashboard.