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Fort Collins KUNC lays off staff

Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts

Community Radio for Northern Colorado, the parent organization of public radio stations KUNC and KJAC, based in Greeley, this week laid off more than a quarter of its staff. While not directly blaming CPB defunding for the cuts, the station cited "an increasingly challenging funding environment" for the restructuring. Ten staff members out of a total of 38 lost their jobs. The layoffs affected both KUNC, a news and information station, and KJAC, a AAA station known as "The Colorado Sound".

KUNC and KJAC primarily serve the northern portions of the Front Range, including Fort Collins and Greeley. KUNC also has translators in some mountain communities, in Boulder, and in northeastern Colorado. Both stations are also receivable in Denver.

More: KUNC and The Colorado Sound announce organizational restructuring

H/T to the Inside the News in Colorado newsletter, which also reported on the CRNC layoffs, including the fact that the organization lost at least $453,000 in annual funding due to the federal budget cuts.
 
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Haven't seen any specific names yet, but I just discovered that their afternoon news anchor was two years behind me at our high school. That means there are at least four people from our smallish school (less than 100 in my graduating class) in the radio industry. (one of my classmates is in a sales management role at a New York City cluster and another is a producer/co-host on a nationally syndicated daily sports show).
 
lanceventa said:
Haven't seen any specific names yet, but I just discovered that their afternoon news anchor was two years behind me at our high school. That means there are at least four people from our smallish school (less than 100 in my graduating class) in the radio industry. (one of my classmates is in a sales management role at a New York City cluster and another is a producer/co-host on a nationally syndicated daily sports show).
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Nikole Robinson-Carroll is there this afternoon…she’s been the PM host for some time.

KUNC yesterday posted an interview with its CEO, who placed the blame squarely on the CPB cuts (the earlier KUNC post kind of soft-pedaled that cause-and-effect relationship). Among other things, she noted that five of the laid-off employees were in the news organization.

Interview (9m12s): KUNC just made painful budget cuts. Here’s why – and what it means for the community
 
JJSPC said:
If they now have 28 employees, that's still more than many commercial stations are running with these days.
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They also do more local programming than most commercial stations. If local stations still had local HR and local accounting and didn't send a lot of that work to corporate, they would have more employees. KUNC is what local radio would be like if you didn't have three companies owning most of the big city stations in this country.

If any commercial radio station lost $600,000, they'd be laying off staff. In fact, that's exactly what they DID do.
 
TheBigA said:
They also do more local programming than most commercial stations. If local stations still had local HR and local accounting and didn't send a lot of that work to corporate, they would have more employees. KUNC is what local radio would be like if you didn't have three companies owning most of the big city stations in this country.

If any commercial radio station lost 15% of its revenue, they'd be laying off staff. In fact, that's exactly what they DID do.
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Moreover, they’re also collaborating with Colorado Public Radio (where there’s some coverage overlap) and Rocky Mountain PBS on news and public-affairs coverage, as well as with other public stations in other mountain states. They’re not trying to go it alone.

In the interview that I linked, the KUNC CEO also pointed out that they’re running 20 transmitters…some full-power stations and some translators…many from mountaintop locations.
 
JJSPC said:
I'm not saying less staff and people losing their jobs is a good thing, just that compared to most of radio today that's still a lot of employees.
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It's not a lot if you want to do the job right. If that doesn't matter, then you can run stations with no employees like K-Love.

People on this board get upset when iHeart Audacy and Cumulus fire staff, and blame it on greedy owners and stockholders. This is a case where there are no greedy owners or stockholders. Just a president who hates negative press.
 
radiofan2023 said:
20 transmitters for how many stations and how many translators?
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Link: Listen - scroll down to the “Through the Radio” section…19 for KUNC, 3 for the Colorado Sound. There’s also a map. Also: Signal Status

KJAC right now is running in mono. I reported that to them two weeks ago but haven’t gotten a reply. KUNC is always in mono.
 
The less dark side (I hesitate to say bright side as I believe there is no bright side to this) is that the laying off of staff should keep KUNC and its transmitters viable in the short term. The station, though in a smaller market, is not doing a KWBU or WPSU where it appears the parent universities are just completely pulling the plug on their public broadcasting operations.

Colorado has a few smaller towns that have independent NPR-affiliated stations. The one I'm thinking might be at the most risk now is Crested Butte's KBUT-FM which has one full-time satellite, KGNI-FM in gunnison, which is actually larger than Crested Butte. In any case, my guess is that KBUT-FM and KGNI-FM are probably in the most trouble in Colorado due to the loss of CPB funding.
 
ted chittenden said:
The station, though in a smaller market, is not doing a KWBU or WPSU where it appears the parent universities are just completely pulling the plug on their public broadcasting operations.
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That's only because it's not owned by a university. It once was, but it's now owned by a local community group. Perhaps that will happen to WPSU or KWBU. University ownership is no longer the safe haven it once was. It's not an easy thing to do, moving from a big university to basically self employment. No deep pockets to reach into when the going gets tough. But at least you're still on the air.
 
TheBigA said:
That's only because it's not owned by a university. It once was, but it's now owned by a local community group.
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The University of Northern Colorado was going to sell it in 2001 to Colorado Public Radio which, at the time, had a very aggressive reputation for acquiring frequencies. Its earlier "merger" with KPRN in Grand Junction left a lot of hard feelings and earned CPR the label of "Colorado Predatory Radio". So there was a community outcry in Greeley and Fort Collins about UNC's proposal. UNC gave a community group 20 days to raise $2 million to buy the station. And they did it.

Either way, the university was getting out of the radio business.

The station's general manager who engineered the sale retired in 2021. Tammy Terwelp is only the second CEO that KUNC has ever had.

Down south, CPR is operating Colorado College's stations (KRCC, etc.), but is maintaining a partially separate identity for them while Colorado College continues to be the licensee. CPR is also doing some broadcasting out of Colorado Springs. The present leadership of CPR seems to have more awareness of maintaining a community presence across a sprawling network (look at Ways To Listen To Colorado Public Radio sometime - you'll get a headache) than previous leadership did.
 


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