My first masthead credit appeared in The Ring magazine. My first professional byline appeared in The Ring. First feature story, first column, first BWAA award-winning article (#humblebrag), first on-screen credit for TV talking head appearance — Ring, Ring, Ring, Ring.

I will always feel a connection to the brand and a certain amount of pride for being a part of its 100-plus-year history.

But as it turns out, I’m done with experiencing emotion over anything that happens to The Ring. I know this because when word spread last week that the Saudi-government-funded boxing promotion run by Turki Alalshikh had bought the magazine and its website, I mostly just shrugged.

Some of that probably had to do with certain other world news distracting me. But the majority of it had to do with the chronological distance from my direct association with The Ring and the fact that I’d already witnessed over the years a handful of instances of the magazine’s reputational decay. Whatever the case, at the moment this news hit, I had, as the kids say, no shits left to give.

At least as far as The Ring, specifically, is concerned.

As far as the state of boxing, the state of media, and the state of uncompromised boxing media, I do still have shits to give. And I’m deeply concerned.

It started with a social media post last Wednesday from The Ring’s account saying “Today marks a new era for the Ring Magazine. Stay tuned!” followed by Alalshikh posting the exact same thing — plus a boxing glove emoji, I guess for clarification just in case people thought either a magazine about jewelry or a magazine devoted to Naomi Watts horror movies was entering a new era.

It took five days, but then Alalshikh : He and Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority — the promoters putting on all of these “Riyadh Season” cards — have bought The Ring from Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions, they’re hiring a group of people with extensive experience in boxing media to run the website, they’ll be reviving the print version of the magazine as well, and they’re digitizing the archive.

Zoom all the way out, and what we have is one boxing promotional company selling a media outlet to another boxing promotional company. There were fine writers and editors producing the content in one iteration, and there will be fine writers and editors producing the content in the next.

This isn’t quite “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” because, for all of his personal failings, De La Hoya has never been directly linked to, ya know, a regime associated with murder. (Google search “Jamal Khashoggi” if you’re somehow unfamiliar. I don’t need to get into it here; the moral opposition to the Saudis using boxing as part of their “sportswashing” strategy has been covered plenty.)

But it’s “same as the old boss” in the sense that we’re swapping out one conflict of interest for another conflict of interest in a business — sports journalism at large, and boxing journalism in particular — in which hardly anyone operates truly independently anymore.

I’ll start by turning the camera on myself. I’m writing this article for BoxingScene, a website owned by the same company that produces the ProBox series. So, this too is a media outlet owned by a promoter/network. And though I’ve never been told not to be critical of ProBox, it is entirely possible that there exists on this website content that is colored, either consciously or subconsciously, by concerns about upsetting the owner, or that there exists on this website coverage of ProBox fights and fighters that would be deemed unworthy of coverage at other outlets.

These are about as minor as conflicts of interest get in boxing, but they are conflicts of interest.

I’ve had more blatant conflicts at other stops in my career. I wrote for HBO’s website for about nine years and co-hosted HBO’s boxing podcast for five years, and there was no attempt to create an illusion that this was independent journalism. We covered HBO fights and fighters and frequently ignored most of the rest of the sport. We produced outstanding content and I’m proud of it, but much of it existed somewhere in between journalism and public relations work.

After that, I co-hosted Showtime’s boxing podcast for five years, and there we were encouraged to cover the whole sport. But certainly, heavier emphasis was given to what was happening on Showtime’s airwaves. And if a Showtime card stunk, there was an unspoken understanding that it made more sense to deal delicately with that reality than to savagely rip into the product the way we might if we were truly independent.

Nobody was trying to fool anybody. Nobody was pretending to be without bias. Nobody was covering up where the paychecks were coming from. Nobody was being dishonest.

But there were, without question, conflicts of interest.

And it’s almost impossible to make a half-decent living as a member of the boxing media in 2024 without any. Show me someone who writes, edits, podcasts, or broadcasts for an entity that airs fights, and I’ll show you someone who has conflicts of interest. You may not think of someone who writes for ESPN.com — covering any sport, not just boxing — as being biased, but if ESPN owns broadcast rights to some segment of that sport, then what you’re reading is not pure independent journalism, even if the writer in question has the utmost integrity.

These are relatively marginal cases, though. When the Saudi regime that is blatantly trying to buy up power in the sport starts throwing around unprecedented sums of money to make a media arm happen, it’s not as marginal.

On this past , host Kurt Emhoff told guest Matt Brown from Brunch Boxing that he’d spoken to people who’d been offered media roles by Alalshikh and his crew. Emhoff said, “Some of the writers who were approached were like, ‘OK, we’re interested. But do we get to write critical things about the Kingdom?’ And they were told no.”

That detail is second-hand — it’s a person I tend to trust, in Emhoff, relaying information from sources he clearly trusts, but that doesn’t mean we should take it as fact. It’s hearsay, if entirely logical and believable hearsay, especially given how often the words “His Excellency” seem to ring out around whenever Alalshikh walks into a room.

Here’s where it gets extra-complicated, though: The Ring ranks fighters and awards titles. So Alalshikh isn’t just buying a website and a magazine. He also may be buying a sanctioning body of sorts. You have to ask yourself: Could there come a time when only fighters who are affiliated with Riyadh Season are fighting for Ring titles?

This all has me thinking back to the early days of the reintroduction of The Ring championships. It was in 2001, when I was managing editor of the magazine, and editor-in-chief Nigel Collins felt the time was right to bring back the belts and offer an alternative to the alphabet insanity. We came up with a set of rules. We established a panel of advisers. The editors made the final decisions, and those editors had strong reputations. There were disputes and disagreements about rankings and championships, of course, but the integrity of the project was never questioned.

A war of words quickly developed, however, with longtime boxing writer Michael Katz, who pointed his curmudgeon gun at The Ring championships in article after article. He was wrong, I still believe, to dismiss Ring titles and their value in offering sensible rankings and clarity for fight fans. But in retrospect, Katz was correct to be skeptical, long-term. One of his arguments was that, sure, Collins has integrity and the people who sign his paychecks, Kappa Publishing, have no motivation to try to influence the rankings, but nothing is forever. Institutions can and do crumble.

In 2007, Golden Boy bought The Ring. (Well, technically, a company under the Golden Boy umbrella, Sports and Entertainment Publications, bought The Ring. Close enough.) In 2011, Collins and the rest of the editorial staff were forced out. At time of purchase, De La Hoya and Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer said the magazine would be held in an independent “editorial trust.” That they broke that trust and meddled doesn’t necessarily mean the subsequent editorial team was compromised. But it did serve to validate Katz’s long-term skepticism.

And now Golden Boy is selling the operation to Alalshikh, and again the words “editorial trust” are floating around. Alalshikh insisted on social media, “The Ring Magazine will be a fully independent company without any involvement from Riyadh Season.” What Emhoff heard rather strongly contradicts that claim.

I know, like, and respect several of the media members whose names have been attached to the forthcoming version of the website. I believe they each deserve the benefit of the doubt until we see signs that they don’t.

This is a tenuous time for journalism. Jobs continue to disappear, and people feel they have to play ball if they want to keep theirs. (Their jobs, I mean. Not their balls. For now.) Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen the owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post overrule their newsrooms and decline to let the paper endorse a candidate for president, either because they don’t share their newsrooms’ position or because they fear what will happen to them if their publication supports the losing side.

It's about as uncomfortable a time as there could possibly be for the Saudi Arabian government to buy America’s oldest active sports magazine, a magazine that just happens to also award championship belts.

I have no idea where this will lead. If bad things happen, they will probably happen slowly — the analogy about the frog in the boiling pot of water and all that. I doubt we’ll look up in a few weeks and see that the first new print edition of The Ring has Turki Alalshikh solo on the cover and is declaring him boxing’s Man of the Year.

But if we do, I won’t feel sad about what’s happened to my magazine. I’ll feel sad about what’s happened to my industry.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of and the author of 2014’s . He can be reached on or , or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.