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More layoffs at ESPN


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On 6/10/2023 at 5:14 AM, Napoleon said:

 


Oregon Duck, loved Oregon & Hockey  and loved how much Linda Cohn loves hockey  

 

I find this one very attractive and awful as a sports presenter. 

I have looked up her background and know that she swam at UT and the. USC but she comes across as someone who has never followed sports, but acts like a sports fan for her job. 

Fit body, bleached hair, spray tan, authentic as a Seven Dollar Bill.

Her brother was a UT QB for a couple of years as well.  

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1 hour ago, PittsburghTiger said:

 

Not just ESPN

 

I know Twitter is a hawt take machine, but it is stuff like this that makes me roll my eyes. Context matters. Company life cycle knowledge matters. 

The Athletic, a service I stopped subscribing to when they inked their deal with Texags, btw, had amazing retention rates. That's why they lost tons of money and never had a down round. They were pushed by their investors to grow, grow, grow (including McConaughey's fund, btw), and grow, grow, grow they did. They did this via a low subscription price, top notch journalists, and heavy marketing. The theory was, gee, if you grow rapidly enough and gain enough market share, one of the media giants will come along, hungry for growth, and buy you out. They eventually eclipsed 1.5M subs and were almost to 2M at exit.

They raised $50M at a $500M valuation in January of 2020. Two years later, after surviving the pandemic in relative health, the NYT, a media giant hungry for growth, came along and put all investment rounds and the founders (some of them deeply) in the money with a $550M deal. Success story for all involved.

18 months later, the NYT cuts some fat on some writers who cashed out or who represent the bottom 5% of performers in the organization, and it's cast as this horrible deal on Twitter. Laying off 20 writers on a bloated payroll after more than a calendar year of the deal being done is actually showing some patience. They should be doing that shit every year, and I would have expected it to be happening in bigger numbers.

The NYT will figure out pricing sensitivities related to churn, move prices upward and bloated expenses downward, and cross sell with other assets and wind up having a still-growing business line that adds to the bottom line. But dipshits on Twitter and elsewhere will drag the whole thing out of ignorance. 

The NYT has already cut The Athletic's losses into almost half, btw, and that's prior to layoffs. It will be profitable within the next few years. In the meantime, the net operating losses that haven't expired from year's past will be an asset applied to tax filings going forward and further adding to the NYT bottom line.

Frankly, that's all Disney is doing too. They let everything get out of control at ESPN because it printed money. One day they looked up with dwindling subs and a changing landscape and realized, "hmm, maybe paying 200+ personalities over $1M per year isn't showing us quite the return we once expected, and we can manufacture newer personalities at less than a third of what we're paying some of these dipshits? time to fire a chunk of this bloat and start fresh." And they'll be better for it.

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  • 3 weeks later...
18 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

Yeesh @ van gundy. Should’ve canned mark jackson first
 

"ESPN is expected to replace Van Gundy on its No. 1 team. Internally, JJ Redick, Doris Burke and Richard Jefferson are the most likely candidates."

none of those three strike me as major upgrades to JVG, so it's probably a cost-saving measure.

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I cannot think of a single espn “personality” I’d give two shits about if they were to be fired. 
Get rid of all of them and focus on the sports
Same. I only watch ESPN for the live sports. And even then, the announcers are muted in place of music I'm listening to. Don't care at all about these talking heads.
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1 hour ago, satyanash said:

so it's probably a cost-saving measure.

Every single move they make is cost-focused. Nothing to do with performance or even ratings. Most likely they replace these folks with younger, cheaper and even stupider former players/coaches.

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53 minutes ago, Hermanator said:

I never understood why they pay so much money for game announcers. Nobody cares about the announcers. Just rotate a bunch of low level jags who will do it for nothing. No one is going to stop watching their team play because the announcer sucks. 

truth.  As if anyone will watch an NFL game because Tom Brady (at $37 million a year!) is in the booth.  Besides, he's almost as lame and boring as Drew Brees.  What a waste of $, could have helped starving kids. 

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I cannot think of a single espn “personality” I’d give two shits about if they were to be fired. 
Get rid of all of them and focus on the sports

As much as Berman gets shit on…he’s the goat for calling nfl highlights

The rest of their nfl guys are boring

I think JJ reddick is starting to become a good commentator, even if he was a douche in college


Bill waltons awesome

The rest are meh.
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Sign a contract with Pat McAfee for $17M per, lay off some of the names above that we’re making a quarter or less of that, decisions make no sense.

I listen to ESPN radio if I’m in the vehicle most of the time. The constant rotation of shows has gotten to be annoying compared to what it was with the consistent lineup they had for years.

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1 hour ago, Bartles said:

Every single move they make is cost-focused. Nothing to do with performance or even ratings. Most likely they replace these folks with younger, cheaper and even stupider former players/coaches.

sure, but Mark Jackson's no spring chicken either. No reason he had to stick around.

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17 minutes ago, Brew said:

Sign a contract with Pat McAfee for $17M per, lay off some of the names above that we’re making a quarter or less of that, decisions make no sense.

 

Accurate or not, they figured that McAfee brings his own eyeballs.  Enough to warrant a $17M salary.

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36 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:


As much as Berman gets shit on…he’s the goat for calling nfl highlights

The rest of their nfl guys are boring

I think JJ reddick is starting to become a good commentator, even if he was a douche in college


Bill waltons awesome

The rest are meh.

Walton is a beating as announcer trying to stay with the actual game being played. With that said I’d be 100% down with a “Walton-cast” a la what Peyton & Eli do for NFL. 
That would completely play to his strengths. 

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2 hours ago, Hermanator said:

I never understood why they pay so much money for game announcers. Nobody cares about the announcers. Just rotate a bunch of low level jags who will do it for nothing. No one is going to stop watching their team play because the announcer sucks. 

That's just completely wrong. People complain about announcers being shitty and annoying all the time. It's kind of a hard job.

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46 minutes ago, Pam Cummings said:

That's just completely wrong. People complain about announcers being shitty and annoying all the time. 

Exactly. No matter who the announcers are people complain all the time. Whether it's Romo making tens of millions a year or the bottom barrel guy nobody remembers his name doing panthers vs Texans at noon. Some people will thing he's great and others will think he sucks.

The ratings for the games have nothing to do with the announcers and everything to do with the teams playing and the time slot. 

Any money above the minimum spent on variables that don't affect ratings is wasted money. 

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