Frustrated on-air personalities are searching for answers in the wake of ESPN’s latest round of budget cuts, which were attributed to financial hardships stemming from COVID-19. Company vets Bob Ley and Dan Le Batard have both been vocal on the subject with the latter eviscerating ESPN for laying off his longtime radio producer Chris Cote (who has since been rehired as Le Batard’s personal assistant) without consulting him. Katie Nolan expressed similar criticism earlier this week, taking umbrage with the Connecticut-based sports media empire’s decision to lay off her podcast producer and co-host Ashley Braband, whose unemployment will begin on her birthday, of all days.
“We didn’t know this was happening,” Nolan shared Tuesday on an unusually somber edition of “Sports? with Katie Nolan.” Nolan recently inked a new contract, keeping her at ESPN for the foreseeable future. Had Nolan, who described being blindsided by the network’s mass layoffs, known what was coming, the 33-year-old may have looked elsewhere for work.
"There was a lot to weigh with that," said Nolan, as noted by Samantha Previte of the New York Post. “It’s also very difficult for me to have just told a company I’m going to be here for a little bit and then have this happen in a situation where normally I’d be like, ‘Well, then I go.’ But now, I can’t do that.”
Clearly, ESPN has put Nolan and its other employees between a rock and a hard place, continuing to shuffle the deck with little, if any, advance warning. Unhappy with her portrayal in The Post article, Nolan lashed out on Twitter Thursday, accusing the author of misconstruing her words while arguing her comments were taken out of context.
Nolan, who got her start at Fox Sports after gaining a following on YouTube, has been under the Bristol umbrella since 2017, appearing on various ESPN platforms over that span.
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