After 34 years and over 5,500\u00a0SportsCenter\u00a0episodes, Linda Cohn has decided to leave ESPN and begin charting her own path.<\/p>\n
As Awful Announcing first reported earlier this week<\/a>, Cohn and ESPN could not agree on a suitable role for her moving forward. Cohn hosted the late-night\u00a0SportsCenter from Los Angeles up until last year, when ESPN opted to move the 1 a.m. ET show<\/a> back to its headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. Since then, Cohn shifted her role at the network to focus on special projects rather than anchoring ESPN\u2019s flagship news program.<\/p>\n Now, in a recent appearance on the\u00a0Sports Media Watch Podcast<\/a>, Cohn further explained her reasoning for leaving ESPN, which she described as a \u201cmutual decision.\u201d<\/p>\n The primary impetus for the departure, it seems, is Cohn\u2019s fondness of the West Coast lifestyle. On the podcast, Cohn explained that just a couple of months after ESPN opted to move the Los Angeles-based\u00a0SportsCenter back to Bristol, she and her colleague Stan Verrett were given six weeks to make a decision about continuing with the network. Cohn opted to sign a one-year extension, while Verrett departed and has since launched an independent show<\/a> alongside his former colleague Neil Everett.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth Stan and I, our contracts were ending end of June [2025],\u201d Cohn told Sports Media Watch. \u201cI can only speak for me. So they told us, like, mid-May, I only had six weeks to make a decision. I didn\u2019t want to go back to Bristol, Connecticut, no offense, but I really enjoyed the lifestyle in Southern California, and living by the beach, and it\u2019s so healthy and so stress free, and I didn\u2019t want to go back to anything that might have felt toxic, which at times can \u2014 you know, when you\u2019ve been at a place so long, or whatever \u2014 and so I didn\u2019t want to make a very swift decision.\u201d<\/p>\n While Cohn didn\u2019t mention any specific toxicity at ESPN, the veteran anchor is likely alluding to the corporate politics inherent to staying at a company for over three decades, and rising through the ranks as she did, rather than any single instance.<\/p>\n Instead of another run with ESPN, Cohn is focusing on launching her YouTube channel and starting other yet-to-be-announced projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 34 years and over 5,500\u00a0SportsCenter\u00a0episodes, Linda Cohn has decided to leave ESPN and begin charting her own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,352,172039,54939,92],"class_list":["post-726073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-espn","tag-linda-cohn","tag-sportscenter","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}