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The Hartford Courant, Connecticut

By Stephanie Reitz, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Dec. 29--Fast-growing ESPN plans to add about 100 jobs in Connecticut in 2006, attributing the growth to several new projects -- including airing Monday Night Football -- and the success of other initiatives that the company launched over the past several years.

The Bristol-based sports cable network expects to employ about 4,550 people worldwide by the end of 2006, including about 3,000 in Connecticut, a company spokesman said Wednesday. Six years ago, ESPN had 1,700 jobs at its Bristol headquarters.

The network's growth bucks the belt-tightening trend in many other media companies in the state and nationwide.

Among many new projects, ESPN will add Monday Night Football, long a staple on ABC, to its lineup next year. ESPN and ABC are divisions of The Walt Disney Co.

ESPN also plans to launch its Mobile ESPN cellphone service, one of several new and ongoing projects for which the company will ramp up its staffing, spokesman Michael Soltys said.

"It's really across the board. It's not tied to one particular project," Soltys said, adding that the new jobs include such duties as producing segments and editing game highlights into a format that can be watched on cellphones.

"We often grow so rapidly that there may be something new by year's end that we had not discussed at the beginning of the year," he said.

The cellphone service, for example, is an expansion made possible by new technology.

ESPN, which was launched in 1979, has been credited with changing the way viewers watch sports through innovations that included being the first to offer a continuous score box on screen, televise a game in stereo and put a microphone on a game referee.

In the past year, it introduced ESPNU, an around-the-clock college sports network; re-launched its broadband service as ESPN 360; started its second high-definition television service; and began a Spanish-language sports magazine and radio programming.

On Super Bowl Sunday next month, the company also plans to unveil Mobile ESPN, a wireless phone service with one-button access to sports scores, statistics, fantasy team standings and game highlights. The service already is available in test markets in Minneapolis, Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and Reno, Nev.

ESPN also is paying $1 billion to broadcast Monday Night Football, starting next season, and is part of an eight-year, $4.5 billion deal in which NASCAR will split its 36-race schedule among Fox, ABC/ESPN and TNT, starting in 2007.

Jeffrey Logsdon, an analyst who tracks media and entertainment companies for the investment firm Harris Nesbitt, said Wednesday that ESPN generates 30 to 35 percent of parent company Disney's operating income.

That exceeds the profit Disney receives from its high-profile theme parks, Logsdon said.

"It's consistently been a 15 to 20 percent grower, and has not felt some of the more cyclical effects of the economy, or geopolitical events, or things that other parts of the company have felt at times," he said of ESPN.

"That obviously makes it an exceptionally valuable asset to Disney," he said. "To whatever extent the company is going to grow, ESPN is going to be a very important component of that."

The network's growth also has had tangible benefits for Bristol and its tax base.

With $222.4 million in taxable property in the city, ESPN comprises more than 7 percent of Bristol's tax base and is, by far, its largest taxpayer and employer.

Driven by ESPN's massive expansion, the city's inventory of taxable property grew 5 percent in 2004 alone, the largest single-year increase in at least 20 years. Much of the boost was attributed to ESPN's purchase of new satellite, computer and broadcasting equipment for its complex along Route 229.

Construction also is underway on a 130,000-square-foot office building at the company's Bristol complex.

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