New ESPN Boss Jimmy Pitaro: “Morale Is Incredibly High”

Jimmy Pitaro, the former Disney and Yahoo exec who took over earlier this year as ESPN president after the abrupt departure of John Skipper, borrowed at least one page from Skipper’s playbook, meeting with the media after the network’s upfront event.



The press briefing in the Minskoff Theatre went longer than Skipper’s annual scrums with reporters, and it also featured the full senior management team standing in the back and weighing in on some topics. The discussion covered everything from the progress of ESPN+ (Pitaro refused to give numbers but said conversions are “high”) to the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gambling (“the space is interesting to us”) to the network’s relationship with the NFL (“not strained”).

While Pitaro acknowledged that he is still for now living in LA and commuting to Connecticut each week, he said his initial sense is that the waves of change hitting the longtime sports mainstay in recent years have not taken a toll. “Morale is incredibly high,” he said. “The energy that I’m getting is incredibly powerful. We did a town hall in my first or second week on the job. After the town hall, hundreds of people were coming up to me afterward, thousands of people emailing me, just to say how excited they are to be a part of this group.”

As this decade began, ESPN had more than 100 million subscribers. That number has dropped below 87 million, with a mushrooming array of digital options steadily leeching away viewers. Saddled with multi-billion-dollar rights deals for NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball games, the network has initiated several rounds of layoffs and reconceived its operations to try to keep pace with the mobile-driven sports fan. Along the way, some notable talent has left the fold. Through it all, ESPN still routinely puts up gaudy ratings, with the NFL Draft and the NBA Playoffs this spring being two recent examples. Special events are still the bread and butter — it’s filling 24 hours on the air and optimizing digital platforms that has presented a new set of challenges.

“We’re seeing things move quickly,” Pitaro said. “More quickly than they’ve ever moved or changed before. The team has not sat idle. They have made the decision that we are going to invest in building a direct relationship with the customer.”

Pitaro, a 48-year-old New York native steeped in digital media, is said to be a longtime favorite of Disney CEO Bob Iger. His interactions with the media showed a savvy exec who is notably different from Skipper, the lanky, literature-quoting North Carolinian, but with his own crisp style, Pitaro highlighted the consistency that remains at the nearly 40-year-old media company. “The mission statement of ESPN,” he emphasized, “has not changed.”