300 ESPN Employees Going to See Redundancy Due to COVID Pandemic
300 ESPN employees are going to face redundancy due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The company said to their employees with a comprehensive memo that they have to lay off several of their employees.
Table of Contents
300 ESPN employees to lose jobs due to COVID-19
ESPN said on Thursday that it would eliminate 500 jobs approximately. Among those, 300 employees will have to face lay off.
The famous sports channel is about to eliminate 10% of its employees. The reason is Coronavirus pandemic as it has majorly affected the business worldwide. Fans are consuming lesser interest in sports due to the economic disaster globally.
ESPN tried many innovative processes, budget cuts to avoid layoff
The chairman of ESPN James Pitaro said in the layoff email to the employees that the company had made all efforts to avoid it. They reduced the executive’s salary, cut down budgets, and introduced innovative processes in production to fight the pandemic. Now it seems the company has come to a declension point.
Now ESPN is also making 200 posts of their company vacant and plans to remain unfilled like that to reduce cost.
No details disclosed about the layoff concentrations
The sports network has not cleared any details about how many lay off going to take place in Connecticut and Bristol campus. The concentration of the furlough won’t be on a single campus. The talents associated on-air won’t be feeling much heat as most of them have personal contracts. Few of those contacts will expire though and hardly any indication that there will be a renewal of those.
Bristol campus of ESPN has 4000 employees out of the total employees 5000 of ESPN. ESPN is a subsidiary company of Disney. They have come up with ESPN+ recently. It aims to connect with the audience more personally. This streaming platform has gained subscribers amounting to 8.5 million.
ESPN plans to reposition with a more personal approach towards the audience
Pitaro said that the company has plans to place its reposition in the new media scenario after the Coronavirus pandemic. Now that the pressure is at its peak, those plans are now at a faster pace.
He added that the right plans to position their resources to have a smooth run in the more consumer-friendly network digitally had never been tough earlier. The changing landscape in the media poses a significant hurdle in the future. The decisions about everything based on the approach to reach desirable efficiency are much more challenging now for the top management team.
Three years ago, ESPN had laid off 250 journalists and employees working on air too.