Fox Sports 1 Is Amazing! Awful! Fantastic! Execrable! – Slate Magazine

At Fox Sports 1, Horowitz is essentially building the entire plane out of the First Take black box. While ESPN fills its schedule with a mix of game broadcasts, opinion, highlights, news, analysis, documentaries, and investigative journalism, FS1 is increasingly all-in on opinion. (Although it does have the rights to major-conference college football and basketball, Major League Baseball games, and NASCAR races, FS1 is still way behind ESPN in the live events department.) The nightly highlight show Fox Sports Live—the network’s main tent pole when Horowitz took over—got canceled in February. And recall that most of FS1’s news and features operation was laid off during Horowitz’s first year, a bloodletting one longtime 21^st Century Fox employee told me amounted to the departures of roughly 75 people. (At least some of these layoffs, this source told me, had been in the works before Horowitz came on board.) Other producers left on their own, while many older Fox Sports veterans took buyouts. (Explained another source: “The old-guard producers were more conservative by nature—they’re all about the games, and they’re a little more reverent towards sports than Horowitz’s hires are.”) Another ex–Fox Sports employee put it this way: “Horowitz got rid of almost everyone who was there and replaced them with ESPN people.”