THE TRICK TO MEDIA SUCCESS? HOPE AND PRAY FOR A GOOD BOSS OR TWO
Truer words never have been said about a volatile industry where ESPN — gutted and cheerless — faces a murky future while ongoing layoffs prompt doubts about Disney’s once-celebrated leadership
It pains me to see the names, discarded like rolls of toilet paper. It further pains me when ESPN internally strategizes its latest round of mass layoffs as a “public-facing commentator exercise.” The names belong to human beings, most of whom had devoted significant career chunks to the Disney Company.
And they’re being treated like collateral victims of a designed military operation by a corporation that likes to see itself as a purveyor of fairy tales, such as when it trots out the Little Mermaid and hails its theme park as “The Happiest Place on Earth.”
In a debt-stacked and stock-teetering climate, America in 2023, Bob Iger’s ship is as cold and fraught as the rest. At the least, it’s a terrible look when the Disney CEO slashes 7,000 positions as ESPN hands $85 million to a gonzo personality, Pat McAfee, who isn’t proven as a daytime host on the network blowtorch and might crash without his traditional audience. It’s another terrible look as Iger completes $7 million in renovations at his estate in Brentwood, a posh neighborhood in Los Angeles. It will be another terrible look when the company’s massive new agreement with the NBA, which wants upwards of $65 billion for new broadcast partnerships next year, reaches multiple billions in annual rights fees.
“The one that’s looming is the NBA,” Iger said during a February earnings call. “I know that’s on people’s minds, which is a product we’ve enjoyed having and hope to continue to enjoy having. Because of not only its volume but its quality.”
So Iger has the money, in effect, to pay commissioner Adam Silver to pay the Golden State Warriors to pay Steph Curry. But ESPN doesn’t have the money to keep paying a loyal servant like college football reporter Gene Wojciechowski, among the many cuts thus far with more to come. Suddenly, you wonder why Disney is slashing thousands of jobs and claiming to save $5.5 billion in the process. There sure is enough money in the corporate vault to pay McAfee. And there’s enough in Iger’s portfolio, through years of monstrous compensation, to re-plaster his swimming pool and build a new horse stable, among other upgrades.
Some of the casualties will be fine, such as Jeff Van Gundy and Neil Everett, who will find work in NBA circles. Others will be fine if they want to be, such as Suzy Kolber, who might be tired of it all after 27 years in the predominantly male world of major sports media, including the night a drunken Joe Namath wanted to kiss her on the air. But others will not be fine. You won’t see them again.
The unemployment tsunami continues to blast through the media industry, with none other than Stephen A. Smith contributing to ESPN’s hellscape with a thoroughly unnecessary and reckless commentary. He thinks his future also is in jeopardy because he’s a Black personality, which is absurd when he’s actually the safest name in the network’s on-air lineup because of race, along with his crossover name recognition in entertainment and politics. “This ain’t the end. More is coming. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, I could be next,” he said. “Don’t ever, ever, ever in your life, as a Black person, take anything for granted. I’ve told you before: When White folks catch a cold, Black folks catch pneumonia.”
In truth, folks of all races, shapes, genders and ages folks caught the Bristol pneumonia in recent days — and will continue to for weeks and months and years ahead. If nothing else, chairman Jimmy Pitaro and right-hand man Burke Magnus have been equal-opportunity undertakers so far. The bloody tumult, which has spilled into social media, has me thinking about life and the sports media, in which I was fortunate to burgeon during a heyday where you could have a long, prosperous, multi-pronged career without perpetual fear of the Grim Reaper. As fireworks exploded along the southern California coast on the Fourth of July, I sat back with a glass of wine, looked at the sky and contemplated the future of a business I entered at age 16, in my western Pennsylvania hometown, where the newspaper publisher reeked of the booze he kept on a shelf behind his desk.
What would I say today to a young person who wants to be in sports media?
Find the best bosses, I’d shout, and don’t leave their side if you can help it.
Because, take it from me, there are a lot of bad ones.
Never, ever should the ESPN superiors have allowed a company to erode so abruptly. What, they haven’t known about cord-cutting and a gradual reduction in subscribers for about a decade? Historically, titans of American industry have saved companies when they were in free-fall. Iger and previous ESPN lordship over-splurged on ego and excess in the last decade — including the $52 million paid for 21st Century Fox in 2019. Bob Chapek, the short-term CEO before Iger boomeranged back last year, made disastrous tactical errors only compounded by the pandemic. In retrospect, a downsizing plan should have been in place since the mid-2010s, including dramatic annual cuts in executive pay. When they execute layoffs drastically this summer — then give a fortune to McAfee, who becomes the most hated person in the company — it strikes me as a bunch of men in boxer shorts frantically deciding the fate of employees as if drafting fantasy football teams. And don’t believe the company line that big names were sacrificed so behind-the-scenes workers could remain employed. Disney wanted headlines so investors would feel better about the stock price. Headlines don’t happen without marquee-name removals.
Such is life at the highest corporate levels. Pick your poison: Disney or the Murdochs at Fox? Do great bosses exist anywhere? I had one in Chicago, Bill Adee, who knew how to turn us loose at the Sun-Times and maximize talent in a sports-mad market. I’m not sure there’s been a better sports section in this country since then. And I had one at ESPN in Erik Rydholm, a visionary until the edict came down on “Around The Horn” about diversity and softer debate tones. I’ve also had ruthless newspaper and broadcast bosses/owners who were in business bed with sports owners/executives, as I’ve chronicled often here and elsewhere. Somehow, I outmaneuvered their ethical conflicts for years and maintained my editorial point of view, sometimes kicking and screaming, until I pulled the plug in Chicago on my own terms.
One such bad boss gave me a seven-figure contract, even though he hated me (and later said so in an interview with a sportswriter profiling me). That was bold money for a print operation — even in the aughts, even in Chicago, even when the legendary film critic Roger Ebert was on the payroll — and it wasn’t received well among lazy and whiny folks on the staff. Weeks later, after realizing the people who ran the Sun-Times were more corrupt than I’d already known, I resigned and handed back the guaranteed money.
“I’m not going down with the ship,” I told the rival Tribune, which had found out before plastering the story atop its business section.
The next day, on the Sun-Times front page, the same bosses who’d approved the contract told sensational lies about me and had Ebert call me “a rat.”
It continues to be the best decision of my life. Their loss is my substantially improved quality of life and health. Same goes for a colleague who fled the paper around the same time, Greg Couch, who has pursued his passion — coaching tennis — and is climbing the collegiate ranks in Chicago.
Since then, I’ve seen waves of talented media people laid off for no reason other than the failures of management to sustain a long-successful business model. And I couldn’t have imagined spending recent years fighting those internal battles. As it was, I was a workaholic in helping maintain a 340,000 circulation at the paper and building “Around the Horn” from its infancy, to the point we were attracting nearly one million viewers daily to the show at our peak. The chest pains that hospitalized me in 2007 would have killed me had I continued at the Sun-Times through its bankruptcy proceedings, a sale of the paper for $1 — why not $1.99? — and numerous owners including a plumbers’ union.
Last month, the latest daily print circulation figures were released by the Alliance for Audited Media. The Sun-Times, now a non-profit, has shrunk to 48,690, a decline of 15 percent from the previous year. A 15-years-too-late digital push no longer includes a paywall, which had to be removed when only 29,000 subscribed. The writers who remain aren’t being consumed by many in a metro population of 8.9 million. Before signing the aforementioned contract, I pleaded for the bosses to overhaul and streamline a shoddy website. I was promised they would, beginning at the Summer Olympics in Beijing. They lied, waiting hours to post our deadline pieces, exacerbating my frustration when I was told to write fictional pre-event stories about Michael Phelps — one with him winning, one with him losing, and they would plug in the accurate version. I returned home after the Games and tried to resign peacefully. An unhinged boss wouldn’t allow peace.
I’ll never forget telling that story to another former boss of mine, the great Frank Deford, on a rooftop overlooking Wrigley Field. He was doing a piece for HBO’s “Real Sports” on the demise of newspapers. It’s no coincidence the monthly program, showcasing important stories by real journalists, continues to thrive on newly named Max in a haywire streaming market. I pointed that morning to a nearby Starbucks and told Deford, who clutched a copy of the day’s paper, that people were reading their news on laptop computers and phones.
Of course, years earlier, Frank’s eyes were glazed when I walked into the midtown Manhattan offices of The National Sports Daily, a print product that attracted some of the industry’s best writers and editors. I followed him into the newsroom, where he gathered staffers for an announcement.
“This,” he said, “is the day we’ve all been dreading.”
That afternoon, every newspaper in America should have sent representatives to Silicon Valley and figured out the digital transformation. All except the New York Times and Washington Post were slow to the switch. I always assumed ESPN, which had dominated sports TV, would be ahead of the same evolutionary curve. Not anymore. What especially bothers me about the layoffs: The bosses have no idea who’s good, a common problem in an industry diluted by its own hazy subjectivity. If you’re going to lay off an analyst from the No. 1 NBA crew, you lay off Mark Jackson, not Van Gundy. But other factors come into play, such as Disney’s cultural wokeness, and that is counterproductive to total viewership. Moving the traffic meter with compelling, upstanding work should be the one and only employment consideration in sports media, but sometimes, inept bosses wet fingers, stick them in the air and see what will produce the most applause in the building. Or sometimes, they just have no clue. No wonder these places are in trouble.
Just employ the best and most dynamic people, regardless of politics. Is that too hard? Apparently so, across the media landscape.
No longer is ESPN an aspirational destination as much as a cautionary tale. With few exceptions, the sports media industry ultimately will break job hearts. Chances are, that ache will have something to do with a lame decision-maker.
Meanwhile, Walmart remained the country’s largest financial generator last year, with $611 billion in revenue. The founder, Sam Walton, once danced in a hula skirt on Wall Street. I’m not sure if Iger can boogie, but he can do the math when comparing companies.
Arkansas, one.
Hollywood, zero.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.