When Stephen A. Smith scored his record, five-year, $100 million contract, the negotiations reached the highest levels of The Walt Disney Co., including ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, ABC News president Debra OConnell, and Disney executive chairman Bob Iger.

The vital importance Disney placed on keeping Smith within the House of Mouse emphasizes a new reality. Sports personalities—not news anchors—are the new faces of media corporations. 

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, network anchors like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and the late Peter Jennings embodied their respective broadcast networks. They defined quality, integrity, and gravitas.

I would argue that sports personalities like Smith, Charles Barkley, Pat McAfee, Cris Collinsworth, Troy Aikman, Tony Romo, Tom Brady, and Al Michaels personify companies like Disney/ESPN, NBC, Fox, Amazon Prime Video, and TNT. 

It’s the sports personalities who are scoring the massive salaries and making waves across politics and pop culture. Smith, for example, talks about national politics on news networks ranging from CNN and MSNBC to Fox News and NewsNation. He’s increasingly talked about as a contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Smith will even do a “Three Americans Live” show with anchors Bill O’Reilly and Chris Cuomo late this month.

Meanwhile, Mike Tirico led NBC’s spectacular coverage of the Paris Olympics, which turbocharged the global brand power of the five rings. 

I’d argue that ESPN’s raid of rival Fox to hire away Aikman and Joe Buck for Monday Night Football, and Prime’s decision to hire Kirk Herbstreit and Michaels for Thursday Night Football were some of the most pivotal hires in media, not just sports media. With Aikman and Buck, I think ESPN immediately jumped from worst to first among NFL broadcast booths. With their decades of Big Game bona fides, Herbstreit and Michaels instantly put Prime’s TNF on par with the NFL productions of legacy media rivals.

During the coming upfront market—where media giants sell the bulk of their advertising time to marketers—sports personalities, not news anchors, will take center stage. 

News Business Struggles

What about their counterparts in the glamorous world of network news? ABC News just renewed George Stephanopoulos—although the Good Morning America co-anchor had to take a pay cut, according to the New York Post. Norah O’Donnell recently stepped down as anchor of the late Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News after five years. MSNBC canceled Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. show in February. Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd left NBC News this year. Other veteran anchors like Hoda Kotb of NBC, Neil Cavuto of Fox News, and Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, and Chris Wallace of CNN (formerly Fox News) also split with their networks. With Lester Holt stepping down from NBC Nightly News, the era of big-time news anchors might be ending, says Joe DePaolo, managing editor at Mediate.

“Lester Holt might have been the closest to that in this current era. He leaves and Tom Llamas takes his place. Tom does yeoman’s work; he does a good job. But the stature of that job takes another hit with Lester’s departure,” DePaolo told me. “If you go back to the Jennings-Rather-Brokaw days, that was a 20- to 25-year era, with those three guys holding it down. The [anchor] position has become much more transient. CBS hasn’t been able to find anybody for the last three or four go-rounds.”

What’s going on? Sports have come to dominate attention in a manner not seen before. Despite a presidential election, which generally negatively affects ratings, sports generated 85 of the top 100 most-watched telecasts in 2024, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, Americans’ trust in mass media has sunk to its lowest point in five decades, according to The Hill. Only 31% of respondents in a recent Gallup survey said they trust the mass media a “great deal” while 36% don’t trust the media “at all.” As the late Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is.”

NBC will remain the home of the Olympics for at least another decade.

The International Olympic Committee and NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, announced Thursday that the two sides have reached an extension for the Olympics to stay at NBC through 2036. The rights deal previously went through 2032; the 2034 Winter Olympics are in Salt Lake City and the location of the Summer Games in 2036 has not been decided yet.

The extension is worth $3 billion, Front Office Sports has confirmed. The figure was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter. 

The news comes on the heels of last year’s Summer Olympics in Paris, which drew high TV viewership and rave reviews as everything aired live on a combination of NBC, the Peacock streaming service, and cable networks like USA.

“There is no event like the Olympics. Its power to bring joy, and the unifying spirit it embodies, are truly unique,” Comcast chairman Brian Roberts said in a statement. “We live in a time when technology is driving faster and more fundamental transformation than we’ve seen in decades. This groundbreaking, new, long-term partnership between Comcast NBCUniversal and the International Olympic Committee not only recognizes this dynamic but anticipates that it will accelerate.”

NBC has been the exclusive broadcaster of the Summer Olympics since 1988 and the Winter Olympics since 2002.

Elsewhere in sports, NBC has fortified its live rights portfolio. In 2022, NBC finalized a deal with the Big Ten worth about $350 million per year for football, basketball, and other sports like volleyball. Starting this upcoming season, NBC will be paying about $2.5 billion a year as part of an 11-year pact with the NBA. The NFL Sunday Night Football package has been the most-watched show in prime time on all of TV for 16 consecutive years. 

Norby Williamson has installed a new executive team at the FanDuel regional sports networks (RSNs), which are operated by Main Street Sports.

Williamson, a longtime former ESPN executive, joined the conglomerate earlier this year after it emerged from bankruptcy. In a departure from previous norms with the RSNs, the live-event production will now be centrally organized by sport instead of by regional fiefdoms. 

About 10 regional network executive producers were let go in the restructuring, and four former ESPN producers—Larry Holm, Jay Rothman, Ed Placey, and Mark Summer—were added to the leadership team, sources told Front Office Sports. 

Reached by phone, Williamson confirmed the new faces, and added that Brett Opdyke, who had been an executive producer for the Florida RSN, will remain as part of the team. Williamson declined to confirm how many previous leaders were ousted. 

“We’re reinventing the business and the way we do production and technology,” Williamson said. “We’ve got four Hall of Famers who were chomping at the bit to join us.” 

The RSNs (previously under Fox Sports and Bally Sports monikers) had been broken up into verticals by region, and will now be organized “horizontally” by specific sports, Williamson noted. 

Opdyke and Holm will lead NBA coverage, Rothman will be on NHL, Placey will oversee MLB, and Summer will be in charge of studio production, including the pre- and post-game shows. The FanDuel RSNs have the rights for about 30 teams across the three sports, including 13 in the NBA.

Holm most recently worked at Golf Channel. Rothman was the former Monday Night Football producer who also worked on Netflix’s Christmas NFL games. Placey worked at ESPN for 36 years, including as the VP and senior coordinating producer for ESPN/ABC college football. Summer is a longtime industry vet who has worked at ESPN and Golf Channel. 

“The goal here is to be able to position the company to take advantage of technology, reinvent how we produce the games. I was at ESPN a long time, and we did a lot of innovation with the games—access, graphics on the screen, analytics, etc.,” Williamson said. 

“We have 3,000 MLB, NBA, and NHL games. No one has that scope and no one has that reach. So the opportunity to experiment, innovate, and be more creative is what attracted me to come here—and what attracted those guys to come here.”