Following up on his column on ESPN.com a week ago, MarketWatch's Jon Friedman discusses SI.com and its uphill battle against ESPN.com this week.

Sports Illustrated.com's executives are counting on the prestige of their 52-year-old magazine to trump the pizzazz of chief rival, ESPN.com.

SI.com, a division of Time Inc. offers readers the same brand of excellent journalism that its big brother presents week after week. But on the Web, where gossip and entertainment mean a lot to impatient readers, quality journalism alone may not always be enough to attract big numbers of readers and thrill hard-to-please advertisers.
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SI has about 7 million unique visitors each month . . . .
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ESPN.com posted 20.4 million unique visitors in September.
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"They're a TV network," [Terry] McDonell, [editor of the Sports Illustrated Group] said dismissively. "We're playing in a completely different league. We've always been about more than the score. We're more nuanced than other Web sites."

While trumpeting the journalistic excellence of SI, and impliedly disparaging the journalism at ESPN.com, Friedman takes another shot at ESPN's Bill Simmons. Did Simmons do something to him?

And it's a bit strange to be lauding the journalistic excellent of a franchise that turns itself over to a swimsuit issue once a year.