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Dei Lynam and Tim Panaccio both out at Comcast SportsNet

Lynam and Panaccio are the latest in a series of high-profile talent forced out at CSN Philly.

Flyers reporter Tim Panaccio and Sixers reporter Dei Lynam the latest in a series of high-profile exits at Comcast SportsNet.
Flyers reporter Tim Panaccio and Sixers reporter Dei Lynam the latest in a series of high-profile exits at Comcast SportsNet.Read moreComcast SportsNet

Veteran reporters Dei Lynam and Tim Panaccio are out at Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia in what has become a trend of high-profile talent being pushed out of the station.

Lynam, a veteran broadcaster and the longtime 76ers reporter at CSN, announced on Twitter on Wednesday that she hopes to catch on with another team now that she will no longer be covering the Sixers.

"NBA free agency starts this week, and I am now on the market," Lynam said in a statement.

Lynam, the daughter of former Sixers coach Jim Lynam, wrote a piece for CSN back in March in which she decried the decline of sports journalism in the age of social media.

"Storytelling is a dying art in this age of sharing information in 140 characters or less," she wrote.

Panaccio, a former Inquirer reporter who has covered the Flyers for CSN since 2009, also announced on Twitter that he was no longer employed by the network.

Details of the separations weren't immediately known. A CSN spokeswoman confirmed that both are no longer employed by the station, and that the network wished both well.

Lynam and Panaccio are just the latest in what has become a long list of personalities to exit the station in recent months. Veteran broadcaster Ron Burke was shown the door in January. Before that, longtime Phillies reporter and anchor Leslie Gudel parted ways with the network in October, months after the sudden departure of her former co-host, Neil Hartman.

The moves are part of a shift in programming away from original reporting to more opinion and debate, aimed at attracting more millennial viewers. The network also recently canceled Breakfast on Broad, an attempt to create a local sports talk morning show.

This isn't a trend that is exclusive to Philadelphia. On Monday, Fox Sports laid off nearly 20 reporters in a move that completely eliminated columns and stories from their website in favor of sharable video segments. ESPN also let go nearly 100 employees in April in a round of layoffs that claimed some high-profile journalists, including NFL reporters Ed Werder and John Clayton, baseball analyst Jayson Stark, and basketball reporter Marc Stein. The layoffs also gutted the network's hockey's coverage by letting go longtime NHL writers Scott Burnside and Pierre LeBrun.

Reporters and media personalities took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to lament the departure of two more reporters from CSN: