SPORTS & MEDIA
John Ourand
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October 24, 2024
Late Night With Jason Kelce?
As ESPN wrestles with attracting younger audiences away from YouTube and TikTok, and fortifying its forthcoming streamer, Jimmy Pitaro is talking to Jason Kelce about helming his own late night show—a decidedly last-decade solution to a very modern dilemma.
Dylan Byers
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October 24, 2024
Playbook’s New Playbook
As Ryan Lizza remains mired in Nuzzigate, Politico’s leadership has been reassessing its Playbook franchise and accelerating long-standing plans to overhaul it.
John Ourand
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October 21, 2024
A Serious Manfred
A candid chat with the commish about Major League Baseball’s evolving local media predicament, its strategy of pooling games, and the challenges inherent in iterating a national pastime.
John Ourand
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October 18, 2024
Is Goodell Picking Favorites?
The NFL’s decision to allow ABC to simulcast six extra ‘Monday Night Football’ games from sisterco ESPN has enraged executives from rival networks, prompted some pretty vicious phone calls and accusations of favoritism, and led to animus and chit-filing. It’s also the latest example of a familiar trope in the industry: The Shield can do whatever it wants.
Dylan Byers
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October 17, 2024
McMahon on Wire
The nightmare on 57th Street continues as CBS News chief Wendy McMahon preps for a meeting with incoming Paramount leaders David Ellison and Jeff Shell amid a series of ongoing scandals and micro-scandals that have the newsroom and media chattering class in an uproar.
John Ourand
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October 14, 2024
CAA’s International Sports Bet & The Talent Murky Middle
Sports media agent Matt Kramer extemporizes about the agency’s shifting strategy and the overall evolution of the industry, in which the on-air talent market increasingly resembles the sports media rights economy writ large, with huge salaries for premium pundits and insiders (Stephen A., McAfee, Woj) and belt-tightening everywhere else.
Dylan Byers
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October 11, 2024
Dangling McMahon
The Tony–Ta-Nehisi drama consuming CBS News couldn’t have flared up at a worse time for its now-embattled chief executive, Wendy McMahon, as David Ellison and Jeff Shell begin taking meetings with Paramount division heads to familiarize themselves with the business—and, presumably, decide who among them is expendable.
John Ourand
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October 11, 2024
The War of the Rosenthal Column
The silly and petty saga of a column, a pissed-off Major League Baseball team, and a strange power-sharing agreement between the Times and Fox—none of which will matter one iota if the Dodgers and Yanks make it to the World Series.
Dylan Byers
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October 9, 2024
The Tony–Ta-Nehisi Affair
Inside the totally predictable, somewhat absurd, and quasi-tragic fallout from Tony Dokoupil’s aggressive questioning of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the furious response inside CBS News, and the latest round of navel-gazing media existentialism.
Eriq Gardner
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October 8, 2024
The Sad Case of Jack Nicklaus vs. “Jack Nicklaus”
Fifteen years after signing away his life rights to a business partner, golfing legend Jack Nicklaus is fighting a messy, potentially precedent-setting legal war to reclaim his name and image—including from an A.I. double.
John Ourand
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October 8, 2024
ESPN & MLB Prepare for Couples Counseling
ESPN, understandably miffed by the league’s much cheaper deals with other platforms, wants it both ways—to decrease the cost of its current rights package and also get its mitts on local broadcasts to power its forthcoming streaming service. Can both sides coexist happily?
Dylan Byers
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October 4, 2024
The Great TV News Comp Depression
The industry-wide resetting of TV news contracts is now firmly underway, it seems, and most talent will be affected—at best by a smaller-than-anticipated cost-of-living raise, often by a pay cut, and, at worst, by a delicately choreographed defenestration.
John Ourand
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October 4, 2024
No R.S.N. in Sight
The latest news, notes, and twists in the Diamond Sports telenovela.
Dylan Byers
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October 3, 2024
Anchorman
Brian Williams’ latest return to television—well, to streaming—is not only a first step toward a possible career revival, but also a potential harbinger of the future of cable news.
John Ourand
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September 30, 2024
Stickman
Gary Bettman, now in his fourth decade running the NHL, has seen it all—labor headaches, expansion, media existentialism, and more. Here, he talks candidly about the league’s distribution strategy, the decaying R.S.N. picture, new markets, and technological changes. Thankfully, he doesn’t make any puck jokes.
Dylan Byers
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September 28, 2024
Hoda to a Nightingale
Yes, Hoda Kotb deserves to ring in her seventh decade by sleeping in past 4 a.m. But the truth is that the star left her cushy $20 million-plus per year deal only after NBC proposed a pay cut. “This is the age of the great resetting of TV news contracts,” one veteran media executive told me. “Everyone is getting their pay cut or their jobs eliminated.”
John Ourand
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September 27, 2024
Zucker’s Sir Charles Play
Sources tell me that Jeff Zucker is close to financing a new venture involving Charles Barkley’s production company—a move that would unite two third-act stars from different fields and add the latest piece to RedBird IMI’s evolving thesis.