I’m not a huge fan of Ryan Clark – but then again, he spent most of his mostly mediocre career on the Steelers (whose fan base and franchise somehow make the Raiders look comparably tolerable) right after leading a Nick Saban-coached LSU program (barf), which was one of the two teams to last split the college football national championship.
The other team, for the record? The USC Trojans, led by Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush (both of whom, coincidentally, would go on to media careers of their own). I happened to be a freshman during that seminal season, so this still stings just a bit.
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After his largely forgettable career patrolling the Pittsburgh secondary with another USC alum (Hall of Famer Troy Polamalu), Clark somehow parlayed this into a high-visibility career as a broadcaster, where he was a case study for why you should listen during media training; his hot takes were, at best, mediocre.
He had to remind viewers several times every broadcast that despite his asinine analysis, the fact that he was a former player (not much of one, for the record) gave him more credibility than the much more polished and insightful journalists who had to suffer through his schtick. Until it didn’t.
Trouble With the Bell Curve
As a viewer, I’m kind of glad he’s off the air, if we’re being honest. But the way that it went down might be one of the more egregious decisions made in the sports world since, well, his team was awarded a stake in a national championship no one outside of Baton Rouge thought they deserved.
But Clark didn’t deserve to go down like this – he found out he was fired while he was at work, during the middle of a commercial break that he never returned from. I keep coming back to that detail. Getting fired sucks for everyone, and ESPN says they acted when they did to try to preempt him finding out about it through outside sources, which would have somehow been preferable to the unprecedented scene that went down at the Worldwide Leader last week.
One of the most recognizable NFL analysts in the country didn’t get canned (like so many thousands of Disney employees, myself included) in a scheduled HR meeting, or even by his producers after the show wrapped. No, he learned mid-shift that his long tenure at ESPN was over.
The same week, analyst Karl Ravech was similarly let go, the guy who’s been the voice of ESPN baseball for my entire life – and for longer than sabermetrics, the Marlins and Rockies, or even instant replay have been around the game. He was no Vin Scully, but he was an institution – until he wasn’t.
Those unceremonious firings made headlines, since, well, they’re among the most prominent of ESPN’s on-air “talent,” but the big names aren’t actually the big story. The story is the phrase that shows up as an afterthought in most of the coverage of Clark and Ravech’s axing, that paragraph at the end that says that “dozens more staff members behind the scenes” were similarly shit-canned.
That detail was mostly ignored by media coverage, but it’s one we wanted to explore a little deeper in this week’s edition of the Mediabistro Weekly Drop.
The Lead: The Worldwide Leader in Cost Synergies
Let me walk you through the sequence, because in this business, timing is everything.
The Walt Disney Company, the corporate parent of a prestigious portfolio of TV properties including the Lifetime Movie Network, the Military History Channel, Crime and Investigation, and the ABC affiliate in Fresno, recently bought a minority stake in the NFL Network, a deal that would allow it to keep broadcast rights for Monday Night Football and become the new home of the Super Bowl.
That deal reportedly also saw ESPN acquire the Red Zone Channel and the rights to the NFL’s fantasy business (er, futures market), in exchange for ceding the NFL a whopping 10% stake in the network, worth around $3 billion according to current valuations.
The NFL broadcast rights alone will reportedly cost TWDC around $2.6 billion a year, or a 30% premium over their current deal; this significant investment, along with a reported $60M contract extension for the Joe Rogan of sports, Pat McAfee, whose unique combination of on-air crack use and casual misogyny has somehow evolved into the face of ESPN, meant the network had to make some hard decisions.
A few weeks after these headline-grabbing deals were announced, those decisions are coming into public view, as this month’s “bloodbath” at ESPN took out not only Clark and Ravech, but also longtime NFL insider Tom Pelissero and football personalities Cam Newton and Bart Scott. It turns out that a journeyman punter is worth at least three NFL All-Pros and a baseball Hall of Famer, at least when it comes to ad sales.
More significantly, dozens of long-tenured staffers who might not be as well known, but were arguably more influential than their on-air counterparts in building ESPN into the Worldwide Leader in Sports, were given their pink slips; one can only hope that HR chose to handle those conversations with a little more tact than Clark’s public evisceration.
In a memo announcing the layoffs, ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro took some time away from running sanitation for northern New Jersey and managing the Bada Bing to explain that the company had “taken the time to carefully evaluate our collective teams, resources and organizational structure to best position us for the future.”
He went on to add that the company is “committed to treating employees with compassion and respect and providing support as they navigate this transition,” although this statement was issued after Clark’s on-air termination, so one can safely assume that they’re likely getting a cardboard box, two weeks of severance and some COBRA paperwork, at best.
Even less credible are Pitaro’s claims that these layoffs were precipitated by “evolving business models” and “asset integration,” which is what network executives say when they’re reading statements written by their general counsels. What it means is that the business did exactly what the deal model said it would.
Bristol wasn’t alone, either. That same week, in another erstwhile Disney business unit, dozens of National Geographic staffers also received layoff notices, part of yet another Disney belt-tightening exercise, this one reportedly touching several hundred people across editorial, digital, and TV.
The yellow-bordered magazine that taught an entire generation of us what boobs looked like or that photographing snow leopards was a viable career path, before we all pivoted to “content creation” and cascading OKRs, has long been a target of Burbank’s austerity measures.
As any print subscriber can tell you, every time Disney missed a market projection, inevitably, the magazine that was once as thick as a phonebook was slowly whittled down to Parade magazine proportions. Boobs and snow leopards slowly disappeared, replaced by wire reports, reprints, and ads for outlicensed travel excursions or memorabilia.
None of this is mysterious, and honestly that’s what bothers me. When a company buys a media property, it’s rarely buying the people; it’s buying the rights, the distribution, and, most importantly, the leverage.
Humans get reclassified as redundancies – unlike, say, the NFL Network and the Red Zone Channel, or FX and FXX (and the FX Movie Channel), which are in no way duplicative in terms of programming or audience.
In this case, like every acquisition, there were some “intangible assets” involved in the deal – in the case of NFL Media, that was a full roster of football reporters and producers – and obviously, someone in the Team Disney building decided the overlap was profligate, a rounding error that cost hundreds of jobs.
The part that actually stings, though, is who’s absorbing it. Barrett Media called these cuts part of “the slow death of sports media’s middle class,” and I really can’t argue with that framing.
Like always, the A Listers will come out just fine; between podcasts, streaming deals, a Manningcast knockoff or two, and the mandatory GLP endorsement, the on-air talent should land fairly quickly, their careers and bank accounts intact. I mean, even Tucker Carlson still pulls in guests, sponsors, and, one can assume, the occasional viewer.
But for those whose only public visibility is their name quickly scrolling by during the end credits that only get half of a screen these days, the future looks much less promising. Entry-level roles will get backfilled, outsourced, or simply automated out of existence; early career professionals, of course, have the luxury of pivoting without a lot of friction (or childcare and mortgage payments).
It’s the 10-, 20-year professionals – the true “middle class” of the sports media – the ones whose walls are lined with technical Emmys and memorabilia from their days working some of the biggest events in sports, who are excellent but relatively anonymous, who wake up without an obvious next move.
Newspaper industry veterans know this playbook – it’s the same one that publishers pulled out around a decade ago, culling newsroom jobs, retaining a few big-name columnists, and replacing local beat reporters with syndicated wire services.
Sports media have largely been exempted from the same cuts that have beset every other part of the industry – until now. Many assumed they’d be exempt just because the broadcast rights fees just kept going up; few assumed that their rosters would also have some pretty strict salary caps, with ownership unwilling to pay the luxury taxes required to keep their teams together.
Some context, since I know that there’s likely some question about whether or not the industry is somehow getting even worse, or if I’m just in a mood (or going for clickbait and hot takes, like usual). Let’s look at the numbers.
The Press Gazette’s rolling layoff tracker has counted at least 3,500 full-time journalists in the US and UK whose jobs were cut in the past 12 months alone; that number remains fairly consistent with the previous year’s 3,900 newsroom layoffs. The good news is that compared to 2024, the market is booming; that year saw a whopping 6,000 journalism jobs axed.
The annual number of journalists losing their jobs keeps shrinking, which sounds like a promising trend, until you think about it for a couple of seconds and realize how math works; there simply aren’t all that many jobs in journalism left to eliminate.
The headline may look like we’re headed for a recovery, until you realize that with a runway this short, it’s highly improbable that the journalism profession will see anything resembling job creation ever again (and that’s without mentioning the impact of AI).
The only winners here are likely to be the stockholders and executives of the Walt Disney Company, who will likely be rewarded with higher share prices, operating margins and annual dividends. Markets love it when companies expand revenues while cutting costs – and there’s no higher cost on most P&Ls than salaries.
Most audiences, similarly, are unlikely to even notice the fact that some of the most prominent on-air personalities have shifted from broadcasts to podcasts; the most popular pundits, like McAfee or the Mannings, are the ones who are still on air, getting paid more than the combined Tampa Bay Rays roster.
Maybe, after a year or two, viewers might finally notice the dramatic difference in quality compared to what they’re used to, but by then, the institutional knowledge will be gone, the personalities forgotten, the product worse, and the quarterly earnings calls even better.
After all, audiences have proven they’re OK with mediocrity in sports journalism – Alexi Lalas just spent six weeks dominating the airwaves. And it can’t get much worse than that.
The Drop
Everybody Else Signs With News Corp As Brave Lives Up to Brand Promise
The AI licensing map has become a lawyers’ game of Risk. Press Gazette’s tracker now shows News Corp suing AI search engine Brave, ostensibly to protect its newly signed digital deal with Microsoft’s Copilot under the pretense of IP protection; meanwhile, CNN’s own IP lawsuit against Perplexity continues to wind its way through the courts after the two companies’ licensing talks collapsed late last year.
The prompt engineering here seems to be something like, “sue anyone who won’t pay, outlicense to anyone who will, and either way, make it seem like you’re standing on principle, not profits.”
It’s basically an inverted pyramid scheme. Boom.
Waiting on Google: The New Theatre of the Absurd
The search giant known in the courts as Alphabet, Inc. has already lost a significant judgment in federal courts, with the Department of Justice successfully arguing that Google illegally monopolized both publisher ad server and exchange markets, resulting in widespread price fixing and collusion. Think Conagra, but with less corn and more cookies.
The DOJ, in a surprising strike against the oligarchy (Ellison, of course, still gets TikTok and Oracle Cloud and he’s a great guy and a better golfer, according to Truth Social), wants Google’s ad exchange, AdX, completely divested; Google, obviously, is fighting that outcome with some very expensive lawyers and promises that it’ll learn its lesson with a slap on the wrist and stay on its best behavior.
Despite their anti-monopoly entreaties, though, Google’s ad tech business makes the NFL look like Pop Warner; last year, it cleared an estimated $30 billion (that’s billion, with a “B”), and their search algorithm and ad distribution infrastructure effectively write the terms for every open web publisher still breathing.
Of course, there aren’t many of us left – and without a definitive ruling, a tough business is quickly becoming a whole lot tougher. On the plus side, it’s still way more secure than working for Disney.
S#(+ Rolls Downhill. Licensing Money? Not So Much.
The News/Media Alliance just announced it had signed a comprehensive AI licensing deal built around recurring annual RAG – which, if you’re not a corporate attorney, stands for “Retrieval-Augmented Generation,” or the recurring revenue that sites generate for allowing LLMs to index or use their proprietary data.
This agreement opens the door for smaller and medium-sized publishers to opt into RAG-based deals, which represents a lifeline for those companies getting squeezed by declining ad revenues, reach, and onsite traffic as sources get subjugated by AI summaries.
Basically, this market – worth approximately $2 billion a year and growing by approximately 50% YoY – has only been open to the News Corps, NY Times, or BBCs of the world, and basically no one else.
This is a significant move that could represent a much-needed life preserver for smaller publishers – or it could just be PR for the same LLMs that have long stolen their IP without asking permission (or forgiveness), and have really no commercial reason – or established legal precedent – to pay a cent in RAG.
Guess we’ll know by next earnings season whether or not this is real money or a press release.
Machine Earnings
While the seemingly diametrically opposed worlds of AI and IP continue to clash in the courts of law and public opinion, thankfully, someone’s actually keeping score. The Tow Center at Columbia University’s School of Journalism (dream big, kids) has released a running ledger of every AI deal and lawsuit between publishers and tech companies.
Bookmark this resource right now; it’s the closest thing we’ve got to an industry ombudsman for the age of AI. Plus, you’re probably entitled to some money from some class action lawsuit; turns out, being an independent publisher in 2026 is about as lucrative as having been stationed at Camp Lejeune in the mid 80s.
Good News This Week
Nieman Lab just published a comprehensive case study, outlining what the organizers and participants of the recent labor strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette learned from taking it to the man – and if you like great investigative journalism, or have any skin in the content game – this one’s a must-read.
While corporate ownership staged a newsroom lockout, the journalists involved did what journalists do – creating their own paper, which eventually published over 4,000 original stories during a single extended labor action. Its writers might have been stuck on the picket line, but that still didn’t stop them from reporting the news, even when they weren’t reporting for work.
That’s the job journalists sign up for – and the fact that so many were willing to choose the freedom of the press over the stability of their paychecks, and were able to do some world-class reporting in the process – should give us all hope that no matter what happens, the press will press on.
Of course, whoever says that “Freedom Isn’t Free” must not be talking about the First Amendment.
Bye, Bye, Byeline
Ryan Clark got fired at work. Most of us will just get a calendar invite first thing in the morning with an ambiguous subject line, no agenda, and a hidden attendee list, except for the HR reps who sent it.
Either way, the lesson holds: update that resume and polish off that portfolio before the acquisition closes, not after.
I’ll see you next week, assuming my badge still works.
Matt Charney
Executive Editor, Mediabistro
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