AllCity Network An ALLCITY Network graphic. (@ALLCITY_Network on X.)

On Wednesday, numerous employees across the ALLCITY network of local sports websites and shows took to social media to note that they’d been laid off. Awful Announcing spoke to ALLCITY CEO Brandon Spano about this Wednesday afternoon, and confirmed that about seven percent of the company’s workforce has been laid off in an attempt to “better align” their coverage with audience and advertiser interest. Here are some of the posts from some of the people affected:

ALLCITY, which raised $12 million in Series B funding in August and recently launched a Dallas site based around prominent NBA writer Marc Stein, sent this statement to Awful Announcing about the changes:

“As ALLCITY Network continues to mature and scale we must make strategic changes in order to continue growing in an efficient way. Unfortunately that means that there were important creators who were let go today and each one of them was very important to us. Each of these impacted employees have been offered severance, health care coverage, and other benefits as part of the restructuring.

“As much as we would like to cover all sports in the exact same manner, the reality is that certain sports command a different scale of audience and advertiser interest at the local level and we’re moving our resources to better align with that. These decisions were made using the large pool of data that has been accumulated over the last few years.

“It doesn’t mean that we’re no longer covering all teams in a city, but it does mean that we are reimagining what that looks like while being more conscious of our commitment to it. This means a smarter mix of daily shows, short-form content, and tentpole coverage.

“Ultimately, we believe these changes create long-term sustainability for our employees as we continue to scale and add networks across the country.”

In a phone conversation with AA, Spano went into the logic here in more detail. To start with, he discussed why these layoffs hit sports such as baseball, hockey, and soccer especially hard.

“I think that in the early days of ALLCITY we really came in and we wanted to be able to approach every team in the city the same way and say, ‘Hey, everyone’s going to have three or four people, and it’s going to be written, it’s going to be daily.’

“And, you know, I think that over time you accumulate data and as you scale into markets, you start seeing trends and you start realizing, ‘Hey, basketball and football shows do really good on YouTube, really good on podcasts. Hockey shows are consistent, not huge, but really consistent diehard fans that buy your merch and buy memberships and watch the shows, but not a big group.’ And then you have baseball, which has always just been very, very difficult for us to get traction on.”

While the company as a whole is well-financed, especially following that aforementioned $12-million series B round led by TEGNA this summer, Spano said the changes here are about figuring out what individual shows and the content will make their money.

“At the end of the day, I think we’re coming to a point where the shows have to be profitable. And it doesn’t mean that they have to be in the first year, but at some point, probably within 18 months or so, these things have to generate positive cash flow. And I think that what ends up happening is we looked at this and said, ‘We are growing our revenue department at a really fast level, we’ve rebuilt our finance department, we’re kind of growing up and maturing as a company.’

“And I think that you can either sit there and say, ‘Hey, we’ve raised capital and we’re going to grow all these others, and we’re just going to kind of continue spinning these areas that lose money.’ Or you kind of mature and say, ‘Hey, we can probably cover hockey for two-thirds of what we’re covering hockey on right now. We can do baseball without off-season shows.’

“…So that’s where we’re going to. That’s where I think the majority of the changes that you’re seeing are happening, in those two areas. We let go of an Avalanche guy, we let go of a Blackhawks guy, and then you’re seeing baseball kind of get reformatted. And we look at baseball more as, I think the next phase for us in baseball is more  creator-driven a couple of times a week, video on demand, but not the intense kind of everyday hour show for every team.”

Spano said the layoffs (which come in at around seven percent of the company workforce) should be considered in terms of the overall company, but he does understand why they’re attracting attention.

“We employ a lot of people in these markets, so it’s a small percentage of the base. But it definitely makes an impact.”

He said layoffs are new for his company, but they’re needed to set them on the right path going forward.

“We’ve never done this before. We never had layoffs even in COVID, before we had ever even raised VC money. We never even had a COVID layoff. People have quit or we fired a guy here or there or something over the last however many years, but we’ve never had layoffs. But it’s definitely a situation where we have to, you know, if we’re going to continue growing at the pace that we are, and we expect to open new markets in 2025, it’s like, we have to get this model right, and we have to be responsible with it.”

A large theme of the criticism ALLCITY is taking for these layoffs is about the timing being during the holiday season. Spano said that was necessary to set up their 2025 plans, but the impacted employees will be given severance pay and continued healthcare based on individual contracts, with the longest-running benefits lasting through Q1 of 2025.

“It’s essentially based on the 2025 plan. And the way that we look at this is we have a different, we have a new plan coming in for 2025. Each of these impacted employees were given severance, healthcare, other benefits like PTO, all paid, all that stuff as part of the restructuring. So they’re taken care of, none of these people are going into Christmas wondering where their next paycheck’s coming from or something like that. They obviously at some point in Q1 are gonna have to find a new job, but, you know, we took care of these people.”

Some other criticism has focused on ALLCITY announcing layoffs shortly after announcing prominent national hires, including Marc Stein and Tim Legler. But Spano said those hires fit the model of what they’re going for, and the audiences they attract make them more profitable.

“You see those basically around football and basketball, probably all of them around football and basketball,” he said. “I think the big-name hires generate the largest audiences. And they are people that allow the sales staff to be able to generate meetings at a higher level, when you have big-name people with big audiences.”

Spano noted that Stein also fits locally with their launch of a Dallas site, and Legler’s numbers thus far have been good.

“Marc Stein, for example, is instrumental in Dallas, so that was a big point in Dallas. He kind of helped us build Dallas. Whereas Legler, for example, that’s a national NBA show, and that was kind of our first foray into a big national show. And we just thought, we had kind of some personal connections there, and Tim was interested. He’s really good on it and that show does good audience numbers for us. So that made a lot of sense.”

ALLCITY is certainly not the first online sports outlet to conduct layoffs or do major coverage pivots, even after significant fundraising rounds. A lot of the themes here were previously seen with other outlets, including The Athletic, SB Nation, Yahoo, Vice, and many more.

But the particular moves (including a notably hard hit for their Chicago coverage, with five layoffs at CHGO Sports) and timing here have drawn fair criticism. And around that, it’s useful to have Spano on the record outlining why he made these moves here, and where he intends to take ALLCITY.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.