More Cuts at ESPN

As odd as it might seemed, I would watch Friday Night Fights just for him and Teddy Atlas. It's not like I loved boxing or anything, but it was such a weird, insular program. You felt like you were just eavesdropping on a couple of friends. Once he left that though, I pretty much didn't care for his take - get it? - on a Stephen A. or Skip.

 

Oh, he was awful. Typical New York loudmouth who talks a mile a minute, won't let the other person complete a thought, so on.
I think he had a tender past though, his brother was murdered or something of that nature.

Still, as talking heads on ESPN go - far from the worst of his kind.

 

This was a classic news dump timing as well. Mid-week when the world is two days from the start of college football season and the last NFL pre-season games.

Rachel will get paid either way. Either, yes, she'll work on the NHL show or they'll pay off her contract/sit her. If they terminate her, that could be, legally, messy.

 

OMG! No no no no no!!!!!
Cowboys Hall of Famer in line to join Stephen A. Smith on ESPN’s ‘First Take’ | Max Kellerman’s future in focus

 

It's such a "meh" name and connected with her though. Why bother keeping the name? It was a kind of generic studio show to me. They'll "cancel" it and then do 90 percent of the stuff on the next show anyway. As Bryan Curtis pointed out, the ESPN NBA shows are vigorously scripted, with one person getting to speak for about 10 seconds at most without being interrupted, and they're always going to suck because of that. It's the opposite of the NBA on TNT.

 

I’m curious if the person who leaked the Nichols tape was disciplined. What he or she did is wrong.

I worked at a paper where we had an editor we disliked who wrote a report critical of almost everyone on the news staff. Someone in production found it on the server and shared it with everyone and she was fired.

We were just happy she was gone, so no one was punished for sharing it. The guy who found it should have been fired too for taking a confidential file from the server.

 

She was demoted and essentially forced to quit.

I would vigorously argue with the notion that what she did was wrong. She didn't leak it publicly - she gave it to Maria Taylor, and I think she was fully justified in doing that.

 

I tend to agree with PCL here. The difference between your example and what happened was that this wasn't some confidential file that only a few eyes were supposed to be privy to and someone stole it and leaked it. Nichols simply forgot to turn her camera off and that feed was being zoomed back to the production studio from what I understand. I know she didn't mean to keep the camera on but because it was on that became a shared conversation.

 

Was she the one who leaked it, though? It was my understanding that the video was already going around ESPN, she forwarded it to Maria and then made the mistake of confessing that part to HR. My recollections could be wrong.