New 'SI' Web Venture Has History Behind It

SI Vault, the new online home for Sports Illustrated's archive, has been a long time in the making. Fifty-four years, to be exact.

The site, which launches in beta form Thursday*, will contain every scrap of content the magazine has published since its launch in 1954 -- a cache that includes some 150,000 articles and 500,000 photos.

Users will be able to flip through digitized versions of the magazine, including ads. They'll also be able to slice and dice the content with specific criteria -- to find, for instance, every five-set Wimbledon final ever played -- and scour the web for clips with the aid of Truveo, AOL's video search engine. Meanwhile, SI editors will constantly be trawling back issues for old stories with fresh relevance to the day's news to post on the dynamic home page and topic pages.

"We wanted to make it both as granular as possible and as large as possible," says SI.com managing editor Paul Fichtenbaum. "If our research is any indication, it should scratch an itch that doesn't exist right now."

That research has been under way for three years -- the amount of time SI Vault has been in development. It has consistently shown that readers of all ages -- not just nostalgic oldsters -- are hungry for the historical context, says Jeff Price, president of SI Digital.

And the focus-group findings were borne out earlier this month when Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre retired. On the day he made his announcement, old stories about Favre on SI.com generated 150,000 page views. "It really hammered home the fact that people are interested in the historical perspective," says Fichtenbaum. "Sports is about history."

The site is still a work in progress. Although the text of all SI articles is available, fully digitized versions of issues published post-1995 won't be posted until the photo rights have been cleared, an ongoing process. And the offerings will deepen in other ways, says Price. "We probably have 10 ideas already of things we can build on top of it," he says, ticking off a statistics database, trivia games and a tool to allow users to compile scrapbooks.

Will such diversions allow Sports Illustrated to catch up to arch-rival ESPN on the web? It has a long way to go: In February, SI.com had 8.8 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen Netratings, while ESPN.com's press kit claims average Nielsen-measured uniques of 18 million.

*Correction, 6:00 p.m.: This originally said "today."