#SEISMAC SLAM BUILD SEASON 7 HOW TO#

#SEISMAC SLAM BUILD SEASON 7 HOW TO#

To me, the issue really isn’t whether ESPN will figure out how to continually make money - I strongly suspect it will, though at what level remains to be seen - but whether its culture can adapt quickly enough to keep up. As technology continues its peripatetic march forward, the need to quickly adjust to new tools, distribution patterns and competitors will surely increase. After decades of steady but strong growth - in influence, revenue and staffing - ESPN’s future is now looking like one that will be as much a cultural challenge as an economic one. Suddenly, ESPN was without the man who had been president since 2012, and someone many credit with turning it into a strong journalistic entity.Įventually, I came to the realization that this might well be an indicator of what ESPN’s future looks like: increasingly frequent seismic changes that lead to a more-frequent need to adapt.

If the first two column delays were more cautionary, the third was seismic. The move came just one month after Skipper had reportedly signed a contract extension through 2021. 18, things got even more challenging, when Skipper stunned the media world - not to mention his ESPN colleagues - by resigning so he could address a substance abuse problem. “Yes, this has been the most challenging stretch,” he said.įour days later, on Dec. In that discussion, I asked him whether this had been the toughest time he’d been through in his role. In an hourlong interview for this piece, then-company president John Skipper was extremely bullish about the future of ESPN and covered more ground and spoke with more passion than in any other interview I’d had with him. When no further allegations surfaced - at least publicly - I turned back to the column for the third time. I decided to tap the brakes again to see whether there would be additional allegations that would need to be addressed in this final piece. Soon after - for a brief period - ESPN was pulled into the #MeToo movement when sexual harassment allegations were made against a few ESPN employees.

Before writing, I felt it was important to see what departments would be affected since, as I’ve written before, layoffs speak to a company’s true priorities in a way no public statement or sound bite can.Īfter the layoffs were announced, I began writing again. My first attempt was delayed in November by ESPN’s announcement that it would be laying off 150 employees. I should note that I’ve tried to write this column four times.

So, while ESPN performs the necessary work of evaluating and adjusting its business model, it does so with real assets in hand. It is still the primary owner of the shared live sports experience, maintains massive audiences on air and online, and still brings home annual profits that would make shareholders giddy if they hadn’t been used to larger profits before.

Changing business models, shifting media distribution patterns and a plethora of new competitors have weakened a base that once seemed unassailable.įor perspective, the key word, of course, is “weakened.” Because there are only a handful of companies on earth that wouldn’t accept the “weakened” state of ESPN. ESPN’s future hasn’t been this uncertain since it emerged from its humble beginnings to become one of the dominant media properties of its generation. And, to close out, I’m taking on the oh-so-simple subject of ESPN’s future, something only a few million people have weighed in on over the past few years. After two years and a few thousand hours consuming ESPN content via all sorts of platforms and devices, my term as public editor comes to an end with this column.

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