Fox Sports Reportedly Wanted Writers They Later Laid Off To Ghostwrite For Colin Cowherd Or Skip Bayless

The opposite of Congrats Twitter is Layoff Twitter, the slow but steady stream of people saying a particular media company will no longer employ them. ESPN had a series of layoffs that rocked the sports media world, and last week Yahoo Sports restructured its staff as well.

On Monday, reports of big changes at Fox Sports circulated and painted a strange future for the staff that’s left on board after this week’s layoffs.

Here are just a few of the writers and editors who announced they had been let go by Fox Sports this week.

https://twitter.com/dkurtenbach/status/879468734485643265

https://twitter.com/Nick_Schwartz/status/879452790669533184

Layoffs are not unheard of in sports media, but what’s unique about what Fox Sports is doing is that it doesn’t appear to be replacing or reallocating the responsibilities of the people they’re replacing. That’s because the site — which recently relaunched — will be prioritizing video first and not written content, a clear shift in the site’s direction that doesn’t require writers on staff.

Fox Sports head Jeremy Horowitz gave the site’s staffers a preview of the direction the company was headed back in January, so many knew what was coming. Much of the rhetoric in that presentation was about creating a unique voice for the site that reflects its on-air product. In other words, making content that readers might think is actually coming from Colin Cowherd or Skip Bayless.

Awful Announcing has a report on both the content of the presentation and the reaction from staffers, many of whom were “devastated.”

“What really does work is when you take things are good like ’11 Coaches Oregon Might Hire’, that might be something someone is interested in the day Helfrich gets fired, and we change to ‘Colin Cowherd’s 11 Coaches.’ We’ve seen this be very successful. You look at Fox News right now, O’Reilly and his take. That’s all it is. And there are many different ways. “Colin, some of our guys and girls want to write stuff”. Sometimes you might ghost-write it for them. Sometimes you might just hear them say things on shows and that can lead you to write a story about stuff they have said. And here’s a good example of something like that. Bradshaw says something interesting about Greg Hardy on a pre-game show, and immediately writing a story about what TB said. Taking our existing content and making that into news.”

But here’s the thing — Skip Bayless can write. He’s just not getting paid to do that. And now, a lot fewer people are getting paid to do that at Fox Sports. It’s a scary look at where the industry might be heading, one that’s certainly a lot less genuine and transparent about who is writing what and who actually believes the things their name is attached to.