How Sports Illustrated Broke the Jason Collins Story

The anticipation that a male in a major team sport would announce he was gay had been building for weeks, along with the frenzy among sportswriters trying to break the story.

Sports Illustrated knew it had the story; it just did not know the identity of the athlete.

Three weeks ago, Arn Tellem, agent to Jason Collins, called a Sports Illustrated writer, Franz Lidz, and offered him an exclusive story about how a major athlete was about to publicly announce that he was gay.

Mr. Tellem did not give Mr. Lidz the name of the athlete. He just told him that the athlete would be meeting Mr. Lidz and an editor at an address in Los Angeles on Wednesday, April 24. Jon Wertheim, executive editor of Sports Illustrated, showed up at the address in Los Angeles that day without knowing whose home they were visiting.

“He felt like he had a story to tell and this is what Sports Illustrated is known for, storytelling,” Chris Stone, managing editor of Sports Illustrated, said of Mr. Collins.

The magazine’s editors said in an interview on Monday afternoon after they closed the issue that they were careful in the days before that interview not to ask too many questions. Mr. Stone said he felt comfortable not knowing more than that it was a basketball player with a home in Los Angeles.

“We could only deduce he wasn’t going to the playoffs and he lived in Los Angeles,” said Mr. Stone. “Honestly, we didn’t ask because there was this very real possibility this individual would change his mind.”

Mr. Wertheim said that when they arrived for the interview last week, Mr. Collins only asked that he be able to tell the story “in his words” and “as a first person account.”

Editors for Sports Illustrated noted that they knew they had to run the story as quickly as possible while also capturing the broadest audience. Mr. Collins said he did not want the publication of the story to coincide with the Boston Celtics’ first home game after the Boston Marathon bombings, which was last Friday.

The editors chose to post the story on the magazine’s Web site at 11 a.m. on Monday because it would not be too early in Los Angeles for Mr. Collins to take phone calls. They also wanted to post as close to lunchtime on Monday as possible because that is one of the busiest times for the site. It was the fourth time since 2008 that Sports Illustrated decided to post a story before the magazine appeared on newsstands.

But all of the waiting paid off for the publication, which has lost a small percentage of its total circulation in the last five years and like many magazines suffered a decline in newsstand sales during that time â€" 46 percent, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. In the first two hours after the story was released, Sports Illustrated’s Web site received five million page views, which is more than double what it typically receives in that time period.