Fox Sports cuts web writing staff

The move reminds me of Jeff Zucker "super-sizing" NBC's Thursday night shows because they didn't have anything else to put on - and the disastrous Jay Leno at 10 p.m. thing. You can act like it's "revolutionary" but the truth is you're just trying to limit costs because you lack the creativity to make money out of something.

 

by the way, what's been the effect on ESPN.com's numbers after they switched to that scrolling cess pool that was supposed to be amenable to iphone users but which makes me never want to visit it on my desktop?

 

THIS! I didn't mind Leno's Tonight Show... certainly wasn't Johnny Carson, but it was decent... but when they tried to sell him in primetime five nights a week all I thought was "This is bullshit. You just don't want to pay for five hour-long dramas at 10:00 and this is your easy way out." It exploded in NBC's face because the lucrative late-local news markets all got killed in November sweeps. Then the drama after with Leno and Conan, and the NBC execs saying "We don't want another Leno-Letterman fight on our hands." Guess what? You got it. And almost all of the NBC execs involved in this were shoved out the door/quit on their own over the next couple years. Yeah, some of them fell up the stairs to more lucrative gigs, but it was still nice to see a network get called out for being cheap.

It's why I always side with the writers during a possible strike or an actual one. When you have to deal with suits like that...

 

A crawl of scores, you mean? I'd like that if they could put it on the app, which I dislike.

 

Remember that during Leno-Conan, Comcast had just bought NBC. Lot of moving parts led to some bad decisions.

 

Don't know if anyone reads TV By The Numbers (it's a TV ratings website), they have a contributor on there who worked for NBC during the 90s. He still can't figure out why Ohlmeyer and Zucker were hired to oversee the primetime schedule. Absolutely bizarre to hire people with minimal experience in primetime show development to oversee primetime show development. About the only part of the job they had down was taking credit for shows they had no involvement in.....see Ebersol, Dick.