Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [380]
Outside of its own digital operations, ESPN’s attempts to thrive within the larger world of the Internet made for one long period of adjustment. At first, they tried ignoring the chat rooms, comments sections, and blossoming blogosphere, but eventually they figured out that, unlike much of the sports world, the Web wasn’t going to adapt to ESPN—the network would have to adapt to the Web. For ESPN, the biggest fly in the ointment was a relentless ESPN-obsessed blog called Deadspin.
Thinking the worst course of action when dealing with Deadspinners would be to stonewall, obfuscate, or erect barricades to hide behind—that would only provoke them—ESPN management decided to deal as directly and openly as possible with the bloggers, granting the same degree of access given to the established mainstream press. They even went so far as to invite Deadspin to thirtieth-anniversary activities. But if they thought cozying up, in the late summer of 2009, was going to earn them brownie points, they couldn’t have been more naive or mistaken. Just a couple weeks after the late summer 2009 festivities, A. J. Daulerio, Deadspin’s editor and one of the most prominent bloggers covering sports in general (and ESPN in particular), called the network after receiving a tip that Phillips was involved in a “Harold Reynolds type of situation” and was going to be fired. Public relations VP Josh Krulewitz told Daulerio, “You would be wrong if you ran that story,” so Daulerio sat on the item. Fast-forward several weeks to a big fat headline on the front page of the New York Post about Phillips’s affair with the twenty-two-year-old and the news that he was taking a leave of absence because of it.
Daulerio went ballistic. He felt like a sap who had been lied to by the company, and so he decided to adopt a scorched-earth policy, emptying out his files for what he blatantly termed “sordid rumors we’ve received over the years about various ESPN employees” and posting many of them on the site. “Chances are,” Daulerio wrote, “at this point, there’s some truth to them.”
JOHN SKIPPER:
I became aware of the Steve Phillips situation from Norby Williamson. We took Steve off the air that day as we investigated, and it became clear we could not return him to the air. He would not have credibility and we would not have credibility with our employees relative to the environment we were trying to create. Miss Hundley made inconsistent statements and acted inappropriately, so we decided she had forfeited her privilege to work here. Simple as that.
JOHN LACK:
ESPN suspending Steve Phillips as a commentator because he’s a married man having an affair with an employee is like going to Harlem and saying we’re going to arrest all black men who cross the street.
For ESPN, this was more significant than losing a baseball analyst. It was anything but insignificant, especially for one prominent couple. David Berson, thirty-seven-year-old vice president of programming, had been with ESPN since 1994 and was listed among Business Week’s “100 most influential people in sports”; Katie Lacey, forty-four, was the company’s senior vice president of marketing and had been on the job since late 2005. Both had excellent reputations on- and off-campus when the married Berson and the single Lacey began an affair in 2007.
In a bit of business seemingly unrelated to her love life, Lacey prepared a performance review for her executive assistant (inherited from a predecessor) at the end of ’07. She and the assistant had realized that their arrangement wasn’t working and that efforts should be made to reassign the young woman or have her return to school. It all seemed civilized enough. But what Lacey didn’t know was that her assistant had been busily