SI EDITOR’S PIMP HAND STRONG, AND THAT’S GOOD THING: My favorite website, Sports Business Daily (it really is), has an exclusive interview with sports biz newsmakers every week. This week was Terry McDonell, who runs SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and SI.com (and a bunch of other stuff you don’t care about).

The great thing about SBD’s Q & A’s is the hyper preparedness of the interviewers - and their ability to pop the tops of some of the more air tight sports personalities. The 63-year-old McDonell, who once wrote an episode for TV’s “Six Million Dollar Man”, was no exception - besides the future path of SI.com:

SBD: “What’s next on the digital horizon (for SI.com)?”

McDonell: “I can’t tell you.”

SBD: “You can’t tell me because you don’t know, or because it’s a secret?”

McDonell: “It’s a secret. We’ve got something coming.”

Despite the danger of McDonell bumping me off, I’m hear to tell all that SI’s digital strategy is decidely less than secret.

The traffic-impaired Fannation.com was recently acquired by Time Warner to serve as the platform for SI.com’s future foray into the sports social networking scene. And Sports Illustrated also recently entered into a partnership with NBCSports.com specifically to siphon off traffic from the TV network’s sports site during the Olympics.

But of course, the main strategy to grab online eyeballs has been to smear screens with softcore porn, with pictorials featuring full frontal nudity (see body paint).

So SI is banking on social networking (which online advertisers are now avoiding like the plague - oops!), the Olympics (a flaccid franchise at best) and nudie pictures (which of course, you can’t get anywhere else on the web). (Oh yeah, and lifting original work from highly-trafficked sports blogs - while thinking no one will notice)

McDonell was asked by SBD, “In 2003, you said, ‘We want a vital circulation. We’re not as young as we used to be.’ How do you attract younger readers?”

McDonell: “I don’t know, but we’re doing it. … I think it’s been that way for two or three years.”

Maybe it’s just me, but hasn’t SI.com committed to a boobs-n-arse-n-yo-face initiative in the exact same time period? What an eerie coincidence.

Finally, McDonell was asked “What’s the next big thing in the integration of sports and entertainment?”

McDonell: “I think it’s all about what’s going to be online, what the digital future is and how that stuff plays out for the fans. Our bet is that My SI is exactly what they want.

“They will be able to have on their screens everything that they want about their particular teams: everything from constantly refreshing photos of the last game or the workouts or whatever all the way through injury reports.”

So the “next big thing in the integration of sports and entertainment” is photos of workouts and injury reports?

After hearing McDonnell’s lip service to serious sports journalism, and then watching as SI.com hands jobs to softcore porn models and produces features that read like a Girls Gone Wilds episode, I have a secret to tell too: Terry McDonell is full of sh– (but who said what’s he’s doing is so bad after all?).