Rachel Nichols : New job | Conversation | Espn Salary

Rachel Nichols has landed at Showtime Basketball, the sports-focused vertical of the pay TV channel and streaming service.

Rachel Nichols : New job | Conversation | Espn Salary

Growing up in Potomac, Maryland, she became a fan of sports during her youth, saying it felt like watching a live storybook movie with heroes and villains, and an ending not yet written.

Nichols wrote for and edited the school newspaper at Winston Churchill High School, graduating in 1991.

While attending the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, she had summer internships at USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times and The Washington Post.

Michael Wilbon, a lead sports columnist of The Washington Post at the time, met Nichols when she was an 18-year-old intern and said “she had supreme confidence.”

One of Nichols’ earliest assignments was to attend Chicago Bulls practices as a freelance newspaper reporter amid the team’s first three-peat.

Rachel nichols new job

Rachel Nichols is taking her talents to Showtime as the veteran NBA reporter is leaving ESPN to join Showtime as a host and producer for the network’s basketball coverage.

Nichols “will contribute to multiple programs and projects from Showtime Basketball across multiple platforms,” per the network. She also appeared on the video podcast All the Smoke With Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson to announce the move.

Also Nichols covered the NBA for ESPN since joining the network in 2004, but she stirred controversy last year when private comments she made about former colleague Maria Taylor leaked, implying that Taylor, who is Black, only got to host ESPN’s NBA Finals coverage because the network was “feeling pressure about” their “crappy longtime record on diversity.” Nichols apologized, but was later removed from the network’s NBA coverage, with her daily news show The Jump being cancelled as well. 

Nichols has a long history with basketball and helped create ESPN’s daily NBA program, “The Jump,” and hosted it from its inception in 2016. She spent nearly a decade writing for The Washington Post, where she covered the NHL, NBA, MLB, tennis and the Olympics.

She also worked at Turner Sports from 2013 to 2016 where she hosted CNN’s “Unguarded With Rachel Nichols,” and, covered the NBA, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the MLB playoffs. among other events. Her first stint at ESPN began in 2004, where she covered the NFL, NBA, contributed as a correspondent for “E:60″ and to”SportsCenter.”

Rachel Nichols Conversation 

A New York Times report released on Sunday included portions of a leaked July 2020 conversation by ESPN host Rachel Nichols that has led to internal backlash at the sports network and surfaced long-held frustration for the Black women employed there.

The conversation between Nichols and LeBron James’ longtime advisor Adam Mendelsohn was accidentally recorded by Nichols herself when she forgot to turn her video camera off and was transmitted to ESPN’s video servers.

In it, Nichols lamented that she had been skipped over to host “NBA Countdown” during last year’s NBA Finals and was instead offered a sideline reporter job.

Black colleague Maria Taylor was chosen instead to host, leading Nichols to suggest that the decision had been made because ESPN was “feeling pressure” over diversity efforts.

In a statement to the Times, Mendelsohn and Nichols insisted that their conversation was about frustration with the company culture at ESPN and not with Taylor.

Another segment released by the Times shows the two discussing their feeling that ESPN was pitting Taylor and Nichols “on each other” for the NBA Finals anchor position and that placing one woman in a major broadcasting position wasn’t enough for ESPN to resolve its lack of diversity.

Espn Salary 

Nichols was one of ESPN’s top personalities, mostly working for the sports network’s NBA coverage as an anchor, host and sideline reporter.

Sources said Nichols was making up to $1.5 million to $2 million per year as a network employee, according to the Post.