Katie Nolan announced she is no longer working at ESPN. The podcast and TV host broke the news on Twitter. She had been with the company since leaving Fox Sports in 2017.
“I’ve thought about sending this tweet for weeks,” Nolan wrote on Twitter. “I still have no clue how to make it not make you all roll your eyes. Alas: the obvious thing has happened. I no longer work at ESPN. I’m really grateful for my time here. I made incredible friendships and valuable mistakes.”
Nolan came over to ESPN four years ago following a four-year run at Fox Sports. During her ESPN tenure, she hosted the ESPN+ series Always Late with Katie Nolan and her podcast Sports? with Katie Nolan, and frequently appeared on other now-defunct programs, such as Highly Questionable and The Dan Le Batard Show.
The news comes less than a year after Nolan re-signed with ESPN, only to have them lay off her podcast co-host and producer, Ashley Braband, who had been with the company for 13 years.
“We didn’t know this was happening,” Nolan said during a podcast episode recorded at the time. “Some of us didn’t know this was happening to the point where they recently signed a contract. And so we are now in a situation where this is the only thing I have to do, and now I have to do it alone, I think.”
That decision, along with an undefined role for Nolan amidst a rapidly changing pandemic media environment, seemingly pushed the host out ESPN.
“Ashley’s reached a situation where she’s worked at this company for [13 years] now, and found out that she is done working here on her birthday, which is cool,” Nolan said sarcastically.
Braband did land on her feet, as she is now the head of development for Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning’s production company. Nolan on the other hand now has the sports media world as her oyster.
She’ll soon have an opportunity to look at a variety of situations and determine where she fits best. Independent media voices have been flourishing all over the place lately, with Ariel Helwani, Dan Le Batard and others providing a template for Nolan to emulate if she wishes to do so.