Opting out of the Swimsuit Issue

The New York Times Richard Sandomir reports today (free registration required) that subscribers to Sports Illustrated can call a toll-free number to skip the annual Swimsuit issue and instead extend their subscription by one issue. SI management is quoted as saying that this has always been the policy – but the mag decided this year to post a message in their pages stating this explicitly. So far, 25,829 have opted out. That’s 0.8% of the magazine’s stated 3.2 million subscribers. When the policy wasn’t publicized last year, a total of 21,065 skipped the issue.