Stats, the American sports data company co-owned by AP and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, is acquiring PA SportsTicker, the company bought by PA Sport in 2006 to expand into the US. At least 100 jobs are likely to go as a result of the merger between the two operations.
SportsTicker provides sports news and results to hundreds of newspapers, broadcasting outlets, websites and more. Clients include Yahoo, ESPN.com (who sold SportsTicker to PA Sport), Microsoft and Fox Sports.
Stats CEO Gary Walrath, told PaidContent.org that Stats had first started exploring a deal a year ago when PA was trying to sell its PA Sport group, “but the markets were in flux and we weren’t able to meet their expectations so we stepped awayâ€.
Then the idea came up of just acquiring the US and Canadian operations, which took months to resolve. SportsTicker will be folded into Chicag0-based Stats, and will bear the brunt of most of the redundancies Walrath plans to make later this year. Stats has approximately 300 staff, SportsTicker 125.
The deal also calls for PA Sport to be the exclusive distributor of Stats’ content into the UK and “signals a mutual desire to work together on varying projects around the globeâ€, according to Walrath.
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