With the massive iHeart layoffs this week, Houston stations are conspicuously absent from the lists of those let go. Was the market spared, at least for now?
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iHeart cuts...no Houston impact?
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
Wait until next week to find out though it took a few days until some of the Sacramento and San Francisco former Iheart staff can come forward and confirm that Iheart removed them. Houston, Las Vegas and Honolulu are now some of the largest cities so far not confirmed to face the Iheart cuts though.
In market #6? Not happening.
I have heard some people were let go in Houston, but nothing confirmed.
The lists you have seen online are all the people who were wiling to publicly say they were let go. Not everyone who was laid off wants to do that.
Thata whee I was going with here is that not all people have come forward to say that Iheart has removed them due to the cuts.
Most of the air staff had been gone already. Meanwhile iHeart has 4 of the Top 5 stations in Waco.
Zack & Jim are live & local on the #1 station in town. If you can't sell 4 of the Top 5 stations in town, you don't know how to sell.
Zach stays, PD and OD, I think. Split up one or two of the other morning teams. If PD was part of Morning Team, PD stayed, otherwise.......
The longer range problem is that our industry has customarily looked at "share" and not "rating". There will always be 100 share points, even when, sometime in the future, few people listen to over the air radio.
A 5 share today represents about a third of the people it did just 20 years ago. Persons Using Radio used to be around 20; all day, 6 AM to midnight, all week, on average one out of ever five persons was using the radio. Today, that figure is a 6... one person out of about 15 listening on the average.
So if a station in a medium market averaged 10,000 AQH persons in 2000, with the same "share" today, they average just over 3,000 listeners.
Regardless, the point of advertising is to reach a mass of some sort. As the audience fragments there are fewer places where advertisers have a efficient way to reach thousands of people. The number may have been diluted from what it was 20 years ago, but its still more massive than individual streaming stations or local web sites. In a place like Waco, you need to have 4 stations in the Top 5 in order to have a sellable number to give advertisers. But that's the point. There aren't many other platforms that can reach that number. The bad news is you have to sell more to reach the same number.
However, radio's industry wide billings are estimated at perhaps $12 billion this year. That's down from an early-20th Century mark over $20 billion. And the inflation since then has made today's $12 equal to about 1/3 of its pre-recession value.
So that all explains why stations can't retain staffing levels as they were 25 years ago. Less money, less staff. Presto.
What is interesting is that the RAB (A group I have always supported over the years) has ceased to issue annual radio billing figures.
While I don't know all the reasoning, I suspect that the negative aspect of flat or declining revenue was perceived as something that hurt the industry during this transitional and adaptive period.
Erika Farber is a great administrator. Not only do I know her from her many years at R&R, but also from her time with national sales reps where she did research for the Metroplex stations where I was a GM in Miami.
Each of these little changes is just a tidbit, but combined reflect the transitional period that radio goes through.
In my historical data on my site, I see that in the late 40's WOR in New York had nearly 300 employees. I wonder how many they have now?
Maybe 15-20 assigned to that specific station.
However, consider in the 1940s, they might have had 40 people in just the engineering staff. They also still had the theater where they originated live radio drama and music performances, syndicated nationally on Mutual. That continued into the early 50s. So likely some of those 300 people also worked for Mutual.
I was brought in to "fix" (not the way my pet is fixed) an ailing AM and FM in what is now a top 20 market. We had 35 employees, with a third of them at the AM transmitter sitting and staring at the equipment or a portable TV with instructions: if anything happens, don't touch it.
The changes in the 70's allowed most directional stations to operate by remote control. I had rebuilt the directional, and it certified as stable. As soon as we could do that, the staff was reduced by 1/3. But we ended up hiring several new promotion and program people, and that helped increase billings.
The move to digital workstations like AudioVault and others similarly reduced needs for labor because everything from recording a spot to doing a log became simpler. And engineering requirements were reduced due to increased equipment reliability and the ability to monitor and even adjust from home or on the road.
I think it is fortunate that technology reduces manpower, or radio could not survive. I believe the next step will be to total central programming, such as is common in much or most of the free world.
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