ESPN drops the ball
If you look at any of Disney’s other holdings, you will see that they are doing better than okay. Marvel and Lucasfilm are releasing blockbuster after blockbuster. Pixar is doing the same and pushing Disney Animation to be better. Mickey Mouse has attacked YouTube with shorts, and the Disney Parks consistently dominate the attendance numbers for theme parks worldwide, even Disneyland Paris rates Top 10 in world attendance, despite its money issues. So what’s wrong with ESPN? Worse, why were the layoffs the wrong way to make ESPN better?
ESPN hasn’t changed since its heyday with Stuart Scott and Rich Eisen. The two of them made Sportscenter more than a show. It was an event. Oftentimes, they were better than the sports they were covering. They could sell you a game, and you wouldn’t even know you were buying. Among the tops in sportscasting, Scott died early and Eisen moved on. It takes personality and knowledge to make sports news entertaining, especially with the Internet able to deliver instant scores and highlights without all the boring commentating. While no two sportscasters could make a network, they were the only two I would watch.
ESPN still runs with its same color scheme and its same format. It hasn’t found a way to engage the new audience. While financial pundits continue to believe that Disney will bring ESPN back to being a world leader, they have missed out on one truth. Disney didn’t make any of their other purchases better, they just let them run. Unfortunately, ESPN was running from ahead and played it like a team that was trying not to lose rather than one that wants to win. If ESPN wants to change for the better, it has just made a terrible decision.
Unless ESPN believes that it did its best to harness the ideas of those it laid off, the loss of the ability of 100 people to create intellectual property is something that will be difficult to recover from. The top talent, like Stephen A. Smith, is going to have their hands full trying to keep the network afloat, especially as they will have less time to devote to finding the information they need to be effective. Their creativity will plummet. While Marvel and ABC figured out how to create synergy through Disney, ESPN hasn’t figured it out, yet. The company and its employees need to get dangerous.
The layoffs have created a culture of fear. That may motivate a few to be more creative, but fear is generally the anathema of creativity. ESPN needs to figure out how to stop the bleeding, but ESPN cannot do that, no corporation can. It is the people within the corporation that come up with ideas. It is the corporate culture that then allows those ideas to flourish or to be squashed. As a frontrunner, there is a good chance that ESPN has squashed new ideas. Hopefully, this will be a wakeup call. For those who were laid off though, ESPN has lost a lot of its ability to create new IP. For any media based company, that is the beginning of the death knell.
Will ESPN find its 'Little Mermaid'?
ESPN hasn’t changed since its heyday with Stuart Scott and Rich Eisen. The two of them made Sportscenter more than a show. It was an event. Oftentimes, they were better than the sports they were covering. They could sell you a game, and you wouldn’t even know you were buying. Among the tops in sportscasting, Scott died early and Eisen moved on. It takes personality and knowledge to make sports news entertaining, especially with the Internet able to deliver instant scores and highlights without all the boring commentating. While no two sportscasters could make a network, they were the only two I would watch.
ESPN still runs with its same color scheme and its same format. It hasn’t found a way to engage the new audience. While financial pundits continue to believe that Disney will bring ESPN back to being a world leader, they have missed out on one truth. Disney didn’t make any of their other purchases better, they just let them run. Unfortunately, ESPN was running from ahead and played it like a team that was trying not to lose rather than one that wants to win. If ESPN wants to change for the better, it has just made a terrible decision.
Unless ESPN believes that it did its best to harness the ideas of those it laid off, the loss of the ability of 100 people to create intellectual property is something that will be difficult to recover from. The top talent, like Stephen A. Smith, is going to have their hands full trying to keep the network afloat, especially as they will have less time to devote to finding the information they need to be effective. Their creativity will plummet. While Marvel and ABC figured out how to create synergy through Disney, ESPN hasn’t figured it out, yet. The company and its employees need to get dangerous.
The layoffs have created a culture of fear. That may motivate a few to be more creative, but fear is generally the anathema of creativity. ESPN needs to figure out how to stop the bleeding, but ESPN cannot do that, no corporation can. It is the people within the corporation that come up with ideas. It is the corporate culture that then allows those ideas to flourish or to be squashed. As a frontrunner, there is a good chance that ESPN has squashed new ideas. Hopefully, this will be a wakeup call. For those who were laid off though, ESPN has lost a lot of its ability to create new IP. For any media based company, that is the beginning of the death knell.
Will ESPN find its 'Little Mermaid'?