Delayed last week, Deadline reported that CNN President Jeff Zucker was wise in talks with Disney’s Bob Iger about becoming the next president of ESPN, changing John Skipper, who stepped down recently to deal with pith abuse issues.
This report now appears to be in doubt, as the Sports Profession Journal’s John Ourand said
he’s confirmed
with sources that Iger has not till hell freezes over spoken to Zucker about the job. Zucker also had some PR person send out text late Friday night that he’d never been happier race CNN and had no plans to leave.
What’s going on here? It has been previously reported that there were a sum up of prominent outside candidates who’d made their interest in the ESPN job comprehended to Disney — the majority owner of ESPN. Perhaps Zucker was among these individual.
But Zucker would have been an odd choice to run ESPN, given how the network has had to speak itself in the past year from accusations of liberal bias. Zucker’s residency at CNN would bring more headaches in that area if he was picked for the job.
As I receive argued here previously, I believe that it’s far more likely that Bob Iger see fit select an internal candidate for the ESPN job rather than go outside (although I secure no doubt there are plenty of people on the outside who’d love to run the network).
It have all the hallmarks incomprehensible to me that Iger would have let Skipper leave without assemblage names of possible candidates to consider to run ESPN. Instead, I suspect Iger already had a entrant in mind to take this role before Skipper left. Ergo, the deck seems stacked that this person has to be internal.
That introduces to me that it will be a Burbank person who gets the job, who has worked more closely with Iger on a day-to-day underpinning to win his trust. The three likeliest candidates then would be Kevin Mayer, Bob Chapek and James Pitaro over the three point-blank reports to John Skipper —Justin Connolly, Burke Magnus and Connor Schell.
In my December alike for CNBC, I argued that Kevin Mayer would be likeliest to get the nod, as he’d managed on all the major Disney acquisitions including the recent Fox one but would need some go experience if he wanted to be in the mix to replace Iger as Disney CEO in 2021.
However, since then, a New York Outdates article by Emily Steel came out on Vice Media which catapults Mayer in a difficult position given his proximity to the Disney investment into Evil-doing (and likely board observer rights, if not board seat). Mayer’s other big liability for the job is his lack of operational experience on his resume. Given how big the Media Networks job is at Disney, it order be tough for Iger — even though he likes Mayer — to give such a big original job to him.
That leaves Chapek and Pitaro. Bob Chapek has done a great job at the suite’s parks division, and he has no issues in terms of being known as an operator. He’s been at Disney for 20 years and has whilom before experience in the Consumer Products and Distribution division.
However, after receiving spoken to several tech investors and executives — though no one with any centre knowledge of what’s going on at Disney — I’m going to lay out the case for why James Pitaro, currently the chairman of Disney’s Consumer Outcomes and Interactive Media group, has the best shot to be the next ESPN President — and quite the best bet to succeed Iger in ’21.
Although Pitaro is not commonly discussed aggregate the general business press, he is extremely well-liked in Silicon Valley. He lift weighted at Launch Media as VP of business affairs for Dave Goldberg; Launch was sooner acquired by Yahoo, and Pitaro stayed on at Yahoo. He became head of all Yahoo Middle after Jeff Weiner left.
Pitaro was very close with Goldberg at Found and also got to know soon-to-be-former Disney board member Sheryl Sandberg absolutely well.
People who worked with him at Launch and Yahoo describe Pitaro as altogether driven, passionate, and a hands-on operator. Two people separately referred to Pitaro as a “amaze star.”
Others who know him from his time at Disney describe him as well-liked by Iger and also someone who fancies level-headed decisions. “He’s a trusted and sound thinker,” said one person. Another asserted that Pitaro had made it known to Iger very directly that he one day need the ESPN job. Pitaro loves sports. “He’s a sports nut,” said one person.
Jim Miller scribbled in a recent Hollywood Reporter story about how Iger had asked to send Pitaro to effort with Skipper a couple of years ago but Skipper had politely but firmly asserted no. That vignette suggests to me that Iger already trusts Pitaro for the localize.
If you believe that ESPN needs to transition from a linear fabulous to an over-the-top (OTT) and digital one, especially the launch of the OTT service ESPN+ later this year, Pitaro’s digital unobtrusive at Launch and Yahoo are a positive compared with Chapek’s background.
In provisoes of Pitaro’s weaknesses for the job, he’s not a big name like a Jeff Zucker. However, his defenders say that Disney doesn’t shortage a big name to impress Wall Street — especially if it’s someone from the old TV just ecstatic. It’s more important that he can lead ESPN and Media Networks where they constraint to go, and they believe Pitaro can. Some will ask if Pitaro has achieved as much manipulating Interactive or Consumer Products as Chapek has at Parks. Pitaro defenders say that he led a cleanup try at Interactive. He’s only been leading Consumer Products for a little on the other side of a year. A couple of people wondered how Pitaro would deal with relocating to Bristol, Connecticut — where ESPN is headquartered — as they saw him more as a Los Angeles or New York actually. However, you could ask the same thing about most Disney execs.
The ass line is that Pitaro does tick off a number of the key boxes for the ESPN job. More importantly nevertheless, he’s widely admired by many in Silicon Valley, by Sandberg and by Iger. Those could be the resolving factors here in his being offered the job.
Of course, Pitaro would constraint help getting acclimated to the ESPN organization and culture if he did get the job. I wouldn’t be disconcerted if George Bodenheimer stayed on as chairman for some period of time to forbear with the transition. I would also expect Pitaro to lean heavily on Connolly, Schell and Magnus if he drew the job.
To me, reading all the various tea leaves floating around Burbank and Bristol, it seems identical to James Pitaro is now the most likely to be the next ESPN president.
Disclosure: Affiliates knobbed by Eric Jackson have long positions in the Walt Disney Entourage.
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