The E. W. Scripps Company has hired Jim Spadafore away from Comcast to serve as its new senior director of revenue, the company announced on Thursday.
Spadafore will assist Scripps Sports in its pursuit of more local and national sports rights, with an eye toward revenue-based solutions to help Scripps and its stakeholders capitalize on the trend of live sports moving away from traditional cable channels toward free, over-the-air broadcast stations.
At Scripps Sports, Spadafore will be the primary point-of-contact for Scripps-owned local stations and will serve as the sales lead for the Vegas Golden Knights, Arizona Coyotes and the Big Sky Conference. He will also oversee new sales deals signed this year and into the future, the company said.
“Jim is a difference-maker,” Tony Lamrato, the Vice President of Revenue and Sponsorships for Scripps Sports, said in a statement. “His strategic thinking, collaborative leadership and execution excellence will be tremendous assets to Scripps Sports and our clients.”
Spadafore spent nearly two decades at Comcast, including its Effectv and Comcast Spotlight divisions, where he oversaw the sales operations — both television and streaming video — for Comcast’s Midwest region. His first job at Comcast Advertising was operationalizing sports programming — including NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA Football, NCAA Basketball and the Olympics — as a sports sales manager, and he developed and implemented strategies ad tactics across Comcast’s markets and sales teams to help them monetize their ad inventory.
Scripps is hoping Spadafore can do the same for its budding Scripps Sports division, which was launched in December 2022. Since it debuted, Scripps Sports has clinched live sports rights for the Las Vegas and Phoenix TV markets, as well as national broadcast rights to WNBA games for its Ion TV network.
