Hey, if you somehow missed it, Fox Sports laid off a ton of writers last week, part of Jamie Horowitz’s much-debated (no pun intended) pivot to video content. Horowitz has since been fired, though for allegations of sexual harassment, not the wide and varied editorial changes he implemented that seemed to anger just about everyone at Fox, according to our reporting.

So, now that you’re caught up there, it’s important to look at the kind of problems that this sort of upheaval can cause, especially because Fox still has plenty of live sports on which to report. One of those sports is MMA, where Fox’s UFC deal means they have a vested interest in content relating to the sport.

However, predictably, they’re in a bit of a bind when it comes to content generation, because they laid off people who cover it, including Damon Martin.

Martin revealed that last week:

Martin did continue to work, writing this interview with UFC lightweight contender Tony Ferguson for FloCombat.com, which included this passage:

“I’m not going to rob Khabib of an ass whooping. I will give him that ass whooping,” Ferguson said. “Trust me, he does deserve that beat down by my hands. I’ve made so many more fans by his lame ass attempt to go missing in action. If that dude would have showed up and missed weight, I would have won that belt. That sh*t would have been mine automatically. No reason, no wonder his ass didn’t show up. 

That must have been pretty newsworthy, as it made the rounds online, even being picked up by a certain national outlet:

Oh, no. No, no, no, Fox, you can’t do that! Points for the attempt at attribution, tagging Martin and also linking to the site itself, but come on. Someone at Fox told a graphic editor (if they still have those) to make up that image, using an interview Martin did for another site, and then just tweeted it out. There’s no attribution in the image itself, either, just the tweet.

Again, Martin was laid off just last week! Fox can’t even go one week without needing the kind of content they were previously able to generate in house. But hey, they apparently think they’ve found a loophole, where they can just take Martin’s work without paying him for it.

It’s a real tight ship they’re running over there. Almost hard to believe they’re struggling.

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.