{"id":366315,"date":"2025-08-23T03:48:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T03:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/366315\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T03:48:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T03:48:13","slug":"jimmy-pitaros-espn-enters-a-new-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/366315\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Pitaro\u2019s ESPN Enters a New Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

Media<\/a>Media<\/a>The network has entered the next phase of its streaming evolution\"\"Getty Images\/Ringer illustration\"\"<\/a>By Bryan Curtis<\/a>Aug. 22, 12:23 pm UTC \u2022 7 min<\/p>\n

There have been moments during the reign of ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro\u2014the release of Zach Lowe, say, or the cancellation of Around the Horn\u2014when people asked, What was Jimmy thinking? Today, your phone can tell you the answer. Pitaro was thinking about the ESPN app.<\/p>\n

The rebooted app is ESPN\u2019s future. For the first time, you can access everything the company has to offer for $29.99 a month. You can pay ESPN directly without paying a third party like a cable outfit or YouTube TV. Pitaro wants the app to help him carry ESPN across the suspension bridge between the Cable Mountain and Streaming Plateau.<\/p>\n

The success of Pitaro\u2019s app won\u2019t be known for a while. In the short term, ESPN doesn\u2019t expect a majority of viewers to buy direct. ESPN would be happy if its cable and YouTube TV customers use the app, so ESPN can learn about them.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s clear is that Pitaro\u2019s monomania about the future\u2014his vow to keep his eye on the ball\u2014has transformed ESPN in profound ways. It\u2019s worth saying how, exactly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2018, when Pitaro took over ESPN, he had a mandate to think about the future. It wasn\u2019t just that the cable bundle was crumbling. ESPN was a mess. A Barstool show was torpedoed by staff<\/a>. There was a fantasy football auction that resembled a human auction<\/a>. Pitaro\u2019s predecessor, John Skipper, by his own later admission<\/a>, had been using cocaine.<\/p>\n

The first way Pitaro changed the shape of ESPN was by buying live events. Lots of them. Big ones. He bought better NFL games, more NFL games, a Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, WrestleMania, the full SEC schedule, and the College Football Playoff. ESPN has never had a better collection of games in its history.<\/p>\n

In a different moment in media time, the sports ESPN showed were less interesting than the things its announcers said about sports. If Pitaro\u2019s predecessors began the process of reversing that ratio, Pitaro has completed it. You could argue he had to, since games are some of the only programming anyone wants to watch live in the streaming age.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pitaro\u2019s approach to ESPN\u2019s talent was also shaped by the times. Disney would have directed anybody running ESPN to trim the company\u2019s staff. Two years ago, Pitaro presided over layoffs<\/a> that cast off Jeff Van Gundy and others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting is how the discourse around ESPN\u2019s talent changed under Pitaro\u2019s leadership. Professional media critics used to spend lots of time talking about ESPN talent: their ambitions, their hopes, their dreams. With the notable exceptions of Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith, when\u2019s the last time we had a national conversation about an ESPN announcer\u2019s feelings?<\/p>\n

If Pitaro\u2019s approach to talent was dictated by media contraction, you could argue his negotiations with talent were helped by the same forces. An announcer wanting to leave ESPN, or find a competing bid elsewhere to gain some leverage in Bristol, has very few places to turn. Now, a lot of negotiations go like Ryan Clark\u2019s did last year. He released a Twitter video<\/a> about getting paid what he was worth. A few days later, he agreed to a new ESPN deal. And, as a society, we moved along.<\/p>\n

Pitaro\u2019s only deviation from this approach came when he spent big money for high-end announcers, his new A-Team. He made deals with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman for Monday Night Football, with the Manning brothers, with Smith and McAfee, with the Inside the NBA crew. These were signings designed to fill scheduling holes or solve problems. (Between Joe and Troy and the Mannings, you could argue Pitaro solved the Monday Night Football problem twice.)<\/p>\n

One morning last week, I met Pitaro in his Bristol office. He was wearing a striped Masters golf shirt and had stubble on his chin. I asked him: Do you ever worry you\u2019re shopping at the top of the market instead of developing talent?<\/p>\n

In interviews, Pitaro is reluctant to commit to a single strategy. Pitaro told me ESPN was both hiring and developing, citing Malika Andrews as an example of the latter.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Pitaro\u2019s lieutenants made Andrews, who joined the company a few months after the chairman, the host of ESPN\u2019s NBA studio show. The same lieutenants also failed to develop a show around Andrews that could compete with Inside the NBA. Then ESPN bought Inside the NBA.<\/p>\n

To that end, I asked Pitaro if he worried ESPN was buying shows (Inside, the Manningcast, McAfee) rather than developing them? Without sounding too much like a midterm political ad, it feels like a network loses something important if it forgets how to manufacture products itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Again, Pitaro insisted ESPN was both buying and developing. Yet other than Get Up and a renovated College GameDay with McAfee and Nick Saban, it\u2019s hard to think of great shows that have been developed in-house during his tenure. A hallmark of Pitaro\u2019s ESPN is that the company employs Mina Kimes to cover the NFL\u2014hooray\u2014but contracts with Omaha to produce her podcast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This explains part of the way ESPN changed. Under Pitaro, the company has begun to think less like a network built around a particular sensibility and more like a sports-adjacent ark that can accommodate just about anyone (Stephen A., John Cena, influencer Katie Feeney<\/a>), provided\u2014of course\u2014they put butts in the seats. Another way of saying this is that ESPN under Pitaro has begun to think like an app. Like Netflix or Amazon Prime, ESPN finds someone they want to do business with. They make a deal. That person becomes ESPN.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That kind of thinking is much better suited to the times than hiring SportsCenter anchors or, god forbid, journalists. To survive in the streaming world, ESPN probably needs to overwhelm viewers with great games and different voices rather than develop a particular aesthetic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But as a consumer, rather than a business analyst, this change has made it harder to figure out what ESPN stands for. Sometimes, it\u2019s easier to figure out what it doesn\u2019t stand for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After arriving at ESPN during the first Trump administration, Pitaro set about cleansing ESPN of most of its political commentary. Employees stopped tweeting about Trump, mostly. Last week, Pitaro told me the process had been completed to his satisfaction. Though with this month\u2019s NFL Network deal needing the approval of the Trump administration, ESPN employees have a chance to do the funniest thing\u2026<\/p>\n

Pitaro\u2019s reconciliation process with the NFL had a similar vibe. ESPN was not in the business of getting sideways with America\u2019s pastime, as Skipper did. Burke Magnus, Pitaro\u2019s no. 2, called ESPN\u2019s fence-mending project a \u201creset<\/a>.\u201d The reset was completed when ESPN bought the NFL Network and other assets in exchange for giving the league a 10 percent equity stake.<\/p>\n

The deal, alongside another that Pitaro made with WWE, was announced the week before I arrived in Pitaro\u2019s office. He assured me that he told the NFL that ESPN\u2019s journalistic arms would continue to function, despite the league\u2019s part-ownership. Last week, Roger Goodell dropped into an ESPN town hall meeting<\/a> to make the same point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I doubt Pitaro will get caught in a public standoff with one of his own journalists. His ESPN is not about that, either. Let\u2019s say Don Van Natta Jr. breaks a story that annoys the NFL, as he is wont to do. I bet the story will run. It\u2019s also true that the new ESPN has fewer vehicles to promote such a story: no daily Outside the Lines TV show; a website devoted to takes delivered on TV. There\u2019s a difference between doing something and hawking it.<\/p>\n

ESPN\u2019s handling of McAfee\u2019s comments about Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett<\/a> was also instructive. In February, McAfee repeated a false, repugnant social media rumor about Cornett. Then, nothing happened \u2026 for months. In April, when the Barstool guys were looking into their phones to apologize to Cornett<\/a>, the network was silent. Finally, nearly five months after his comments, McAfee apologized<\/a>, saying he\u2019d been waiting to meet with Cornett\u2019s family first.<\/p>\n

Last week, when I asked Pitaro about this, he told me he was pleased with McAfee\u2019s apology. He repeated the host\u2019s explanation about meeting with Cornett\u2019s parents. \u201cThey were satisfied,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cPat was satisfied. I was happy with Pat\u2019s on-air apology. And we move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

What about ESPN\u2019s viewers? I asked. If Cornett\u2019s family was owed an explanation and an apology, surely viewers were, too. \u201cWe talked about that internally,\u201d said Pitaro, before repeating he was \u201cat peace\u201d with McAfee\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to square the bravado about NFL reporting with a five-month lag between an error and a correction. But if there\u2019s something else Pitaro\u2019s ESPN is not about, it\u2019s a public fight with an anchor, a suspension, corporate business being transacted in front of the public. In our conversation, Pitaro kept his eye on the ball. There were many great games to be shown on the app. There was a company to nudge into the streaming age. And we move on.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bryan Curtis<\/p>\n

<\/a>Bryan Curtis is the editor-at-large of The Ringer and cohost of \u2018The Press Box\u2019 podcast. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, he\u2019s written for The New Republic, Slate, Play, and Grantland. He plays a deejay in a movie about the end of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MediaMediaThe network has entered the next phase of its streaming evolutionGetty Images\/Ringer illustrationBy Bryan CurtisAug. 22, 12:23 pm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[77,382,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-366315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115076039070987923","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}