As Gannett Withdraws, Uncertainty at Sports Site

The sports website was co-owned by Gannett and a unit of Major League Baseball, which will continue to own and operate it. By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY August 10, 2014

Last Tuesday morning, shortly after the Gannett Company announced it was splitting into separate print and broadcasting companies, word surfaced on social media that the website Sports on Earth, partly owned by Gannett, would be affected.

"Watching all your colleagues tweet they've been fired and waiting for the same call is not a good feeling!" wrote Aaron Gordon, a contributing writer for the site. Jeb Lund, another of the site's writers, wrote on Twitter: "Someone clue me in about Sports on Earth because I don't know what happened, but it sounds like I lost another job?"

Mr. Gordon and Mr. Lund had cause for concern. The two companies that each owned 50 percent of Sports on Earth — Gannett's USA Today Sports Media Group and Major League Baseball's MLB Advanced Media — had ended their partnership. Gannett withdrew from the site entirely. Major League Baseball, which will continue to own and operate Sports on Earth, laid off four of the company's seven full-time editors and business-side employees. Its relationships with its contributing writers remains uncertain: The site kept two out of 12 of them.

"Sports on Earth is going to continue, and I, along with the others staying, will do our best to do a great site, but it won't be the same, obviously," Will Leitch, a senior writer, wrote on his Tumblr page.

Fans of Sports on Earth and members of the sports media castigated the companies for how they handled the layoffs. On ESPN2, Keith Olbermann called Gannett and Major League Baseball the "worst persons in the sports world" for their mismanagement. "I don't care if you've been in the media for 30 days or 30 minutes," Mr. Olbermann said. "That's not the way you do it."

Dave Morgan, president of the USA Today Sports Media Group, said that he had been speaking for weeks with Major League Baseball about renegotiating the partnership. While Sports on Earth had grown to nearly 1.1 million unique visitors this June, from 231,000 in June 2013, its readership was a small fraction of the 39.6 million unique views that all the websites run by USA Today's Sports Media Group received this June, according to data tracked by comScore.

"We think the site produced some really good content. It had a very engaged audience," Mr. Morgan said. "It had not become a great business yet."

Mr. Morgan stressed that Gannett had not been involved with the layoffs.

Bob Bowman, MLB Advanced Media's president and chief executive, said that without its joint venture agreement with Gannett, the company could depend more on its existing staff. And Matthew Gould, a Major League Baseball spokesman, said that the site would rely on writers from MLB.com for some content.

Mr. Bowman said that all the full-time employees who were laid off received severance packages and added that it was difficult to lay off employees in the age of Twitter. "I don't think you can talk to everyone at the same time," he said.

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