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Sports media reporter Jimmy Traina announced last week that he would be leaving Sports Illustrated after more than two decades with the publication. Traina is joining Underscore Media, where he will host podcasts, write newsletters, and continue to cover sports media from his fan-forward perspective. Speaking with John Ourand on Puck’s podcast The Varsity, Traina said that his decision to walk away from SI was in the works for some time, and ultimately came down to how he wants to be spending his working hours. “The decision was not something that came quickly. I would say for probably two years at least I have been wanting to stop writing five days a week,” Traina said. “I have been writing five days a week, a daily column Monday through Friday, since 2007.” Traina said that the grind of his daily column was getting to him, and he felt it was difficult to give his audience a fully fleshed out piece every single day when covering his beat. “We have jobs where no one ever wants to hear us complain about our jobs, we’re in the playground covering sports, but when you wake up every single morning and you have a blank page in front of you and you have to fill it, there’s a lot of stress there. You don’t want to short-change people. You want to give them a good column. And I don’t know how you give them a good column when you’re doing it five days a week. We’re covering sports media. If I covered a league — if you cover the NFL yeah, you can probably write five days a week in your sleep. But there’s not sports media news every single day.” Beyond the grind of the daily column, Traina also believed it was time to move on to something new just based on the direction the media industry is moving. “You could make the argument that I should have made a move maybe two, three, four years ago,” Traina said. “There is a move in this business — whether you like it or not, I don’t like it, but this is what it is. It’s all about YouTube, Reels, TikTok, that is I felt where you need to be. I was only doing one pod a week at SI. I don’t think we maximized the clips. I don’t think we maximized the promotion for it.” He continued: “The days of trying to get Google search, SEO, headlines — those days are over. There’s other revenue streams now. Live events, watchalongs, stuff like that. I’ll probably be doing those. I think when you leave a job, it’s not for one reason. … For me it was the way media consumption has changed, it was wanting to do less writing and more podcasting, and going to a start-up where I’ll have way more freedom.” Traina’s new workload will indeed look different. He says he plans on producing three podcasts a week in addition to writing newsletters twice a week. Underscore Media is set to officially launch ahead of the start of the coming NFL season.