The latest exit at The Washington Post is its CEO. Plus: two MLB teams consider creating their own multi-team RSNs; WNBA collective bargaining negotiations are reaching the pivot point; and more.<\/p>\n
Washington Post CEO steps down<\/p>\n
Three days after The Washington Post functionally shuttered its sports department<\/a> as part of a massive wave of layoffs, its publisher and CEO Will Lewis announced Saturday that he will step down after a two-year tenure. The newspaper officially announced Saturday<\/a> that Jeff D\u2019Onofrio \u2014 the former CEO of Tumblr and CFO of the ad provider Raptive \u2014 will take over as acting CEO and publisher.<\/p>\n Lewis had been the subject of heavy criticism in recent days for skipping for the Wednesday conference call in which the firings were announced, but finding the time to attend Super Bowl week events on-site. <\/p>\n Matt Murray, the Post executive editor who announced the firings to staffers Wednesday, told Puck\u2019s Dylan Byers on \u201cThe Grill Room\u201d podcast<\/a> Thursday that the Post was not \u201cable to compete\u201d in a changing journalism ecosystem in part because \u201cwe had this large cost base.\u201d Murray: \u201cA lot of people express love of our sports team and our sports department was \u2014 is \u2014 very talented; we had great writers \u2026 And it\u2019s no comment on any of those folks and their talents, but we aren\u2019t in that space, we aren\u2019t as relevant as we might be. Not that we\u2019re not great, but we weren\u2019t even as a company in a position to be there.\u201d Murray also told The New York Times<\/a> that the Post had not been \u201cseen digitally as a major sports destination.\u201d<\/p>\n In the statement announcing D\u2019Onofrio\u2019s hire \u2014 and his first public statement since the cuts \u2014 Post owner Jeff Bezos said Saturday that the \u201cdata tells us what is valuable and where to focus.\u201d <\/p>\n Braves, Angels, considering own multi-team RSNs<\/p>\n The MLB Braves and Angels are both weighing the launch of their own RSNs that would host teams from multiple sports, Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal reported Thursday<\/a>. Any potential network would have to launch in time for the Major League Baseball season, which begins next month.<\/p>\n The seven other Major League Baseball teams who had been with Main Street Sports Group have either announced, or are expected to announce<\/a>, that they will be shifting production and distribution of their games to the in-house MLB Media production arm.<\/p>\n Per Friend, the Angels could also end up moving to MLB Media, as they have requested more time from MLB to make a decision. Unlike the Braves, who would be creating an entirely new RSN, the Angels already co-own the FanDuel Sports Network West RSN and would have to buy out Main Street in order to acquire the channel in full. In that event, the team would recruit the NHL Kings \u2014 who also play on that RSN \u2014 with the promise of a rights fee, rather than co-ownership.<\/p>\n Similarly, the Braves would control their RSN and recruit other teams as clients rather than partners. That includes the NBA Hawks, with whom the Braves have already reportedly held talks.<\/p>\n Growing concern about delayed WNBA season, players\u2019 strike<\/p>\n There is \u201cgrowing concern\u201d that the start of the WNBA season will have to be delayed if the league and players union are unable to reach a new collective bargaining agreement by next week, Annie Costabile of Front Office Sports reported Saturday<\/a>. The regular season is set to begin three months from Sunday, but the league needs to conduct two expansion drafts, free agency, a regular draft and training camps beforehand.<\/p>\n The union in December authorized its executive committee to call a strike \u201cwhen necessary.\u201d According to Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal Saturday<\/a>, there is a \u201csense\u201d among sources that a \u201cplayer picket line\u201d could come as soon as next week at NBA All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles. There has never been a collective bargaining-related work stoppage in the history of the WNBA<\/p>\n By all accounts, talks have been at a stalemate. It took six weeks after the union\u2019s most recent proposal in December for the league to respond with a counteroffer this past Friday. Per Alexa Phillipou of ESPN<\/a>, the league continues to offer the players a percentage of net revenue \u2014 or revenue after expenses \u2014 while the players are seeking a cut of gross revenue.<\/p>\n The difference is significant, as the players estimate that the owners\u2019 proposed 70% cut of net revenue would equal less than 15% of the gross, Friend reported Saturday. That is less than half of the 30% of gross revenue the players are seeking.<\/p>\n Plus: NDSU, F1 Super Bowl ad, Jurgensen, Nielsen-Tubi<\/p>\n North Dakota State, a perennial contender in FCS football, is in \u201cserious\u201d talks to join the Mountain West, Ross Dellinger of Yahoo Sports<\/a> was first to report Friday. The talks, which have been going on for a year, would increase the Mountain West membership to ten football schools. The conference just this week announced new multi-year media rights deals<\/a> with CBS Sports, Fox Sports, Nexstar-owned CW and Kiswe.
\nThe new Cadillac Formula 1 team will run a Super Bowl ad that includes a \u201cprominent\u201d promotion of Apple TV\u2019s new F1 package, according to Alex Weprin of The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>. While the ad will not be specifically promoting the Apple TV coverage, it will include a call-to-action at the end that reads \u201cwatch on Apple TV.\u201d Apple is entering the first year of its new contract to become the exclusive U.S. home of F1 racing.
\nSonny Jurgensen, the Pro Football Hall of Famer who spent more than four decades in the broadcast booth \u2014 first nationally with CBS and then for 38-straight years on local radio in Washington D.C. \u2014 died Friday at age 91<\/a>. Jurgensen retired from broadcasting in 2019.
\nNielsen has reached a multi-year expansion of its existing partnership with Fox-owned Tubi, it was announced Thursday. The new agreement will grant the free, ad-supported streamer greater access to Nielsen\u2019s various measurement products, presumably making it easier for the service to sell advertising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The latest exit at The Washington Post is its CEO. Plus: two MLB teams consider creating their own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,16310,163991,188468,82,186965,630,119012],"class_list":{"0":"post-461215","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-conference-realignment","11":"tag-news-about-nielsen","12":"tag-nfl-broadcasters","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-super-bowl-ads","15":"tag-wnba","16":"tag-wnba-collective-bargaining"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}