ESPN will relaunch “Sports Reporters” as a stand-alone YouTube program six years after ending the program’s 29-year run on its flagship linear network.
The former Sunday morning stalwart’s revival will debut in mid-2023, according to the Sports Business Journal, which first reported the development. It will be hosted by ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap, the son of Dick Schaap, the legendary sports journalist who hosted “Sports Reporters” for more than a decade before his death in 2001.
“Sports Reporters” ran from 1988 to 2017 until it was canceled not long after the death of John Saunders, who had replaced Dick Schaap and served as longtime host. The show pioneered the sportswriter roundtable format that would later be used as a model for the long-running daily ESPN show “Around the Horn” and others.
ESPN will also be leveraging YouTube for the Jeremy Schaap-hosted “Outside the Lines,” which it will discontinue running on its linear network after the Super Bowl. “OTL” segments will continue as part of SportsCenter and migrated to the network’s YouTube channel. The decision to stop the linear TV show “will not result in any job losses” as the Disney-owned sports media powerhouse reassigns staff to other programs, the SBJ reported.
As of Feb. 1, YouTube started offering creators a new revenue share model for short-form videos on its platform. YouTube Shorts are seen as the Alphabet subsidiary and Google sister company’s answer to TikTok’s runway success with short-form user-generated video content.
