Hey everybody, this is Richard Deich, and welcome to the Sports Media podcast. My producers, as always, are Patrick Antenetti and Sean Cherry. Our guest this week is a regular on this podcast, and certainly was a regular on the podcast that I did.

At Sports Illustrated, James Andrew Miller.

It's the bestselling author of books on CAA, ESPN, and Saturday Night Live.

It's the host of the Origins podcast, which is part of the Cadence 13 family as I am.

And you have been reading his work and hearing his thoughts on media for many years.

And Jim Miller joins me today. Jim, I wish the topic that we're going to talk about was a more positive topic.

But it's unfortunately not.

As sort of we have seen in 2020 with companies laying off people, including one of the companies I work at, The Athletic and NBC Sports and SB Nation and Sports Illustrated, and the list goes on and on.

This week ESPN announced its layoffs.

300 people are being laid off from the company, and then they are not filling an existing 200 jobs.

Probably in addition to that, Jim, there will be talent, as I reported, and others are reported,

who are not going to be re-signed whenever their contract is up,

and that, of course, is another way to do cost savings.

In addition to new talent or existing talent not being re-signed

to anywhere probably close to the financial deals that they got.

So that sets up my conversation with you. How did you view the news this

week of the ESPNLFs? Well, unfortunately, it wasn't a surprise. I mean, I think that this is something

that the network, in particular, Jimmy Pertaro, has been, they've been trying to avoid for many,

many months. And I think probably from a strategic business point of view,

they knew that there would be some sort of adjustment that would have to be made prior to even COVID,

just because of the nature of the way the business is changing.

Several years ago, they had to do a round of layoffs as they migrated from linear to

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