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Audacy Bankruptcy Goes To FCC
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
The main challenge to the Audacy bankruptcy plan was filed by Brent Bozell. He was just nominated to become the head of the USAGM:
www.voanews.com
If I'm at Audacy, I'm looking for a replacement for the Soros money right away.
This man is no longer a crazy crackpot on the outside of the government. He now runs government media.
He's never actually worked in media. Then again his secretary of education never worked in education. She was president of WWE.
Trump selects nominee to lead US global media agency
Head of conservative media bias watchdog named to lead entity overseeing independent news agencies including VOA
www.voanews.com
If I'm at Audacy, I'm looking for a replacement for the Soros money right away.
This man is no longer a crazy crackpot on the outside of the government. He now runs government media.
He's never actually worked in media. Then again his secretary of education never worked in education. She was president of WWE.
No surprise here: David Field To Step Down As Audacy CEO
The statements from Field and Audacy are epic examples of corporate double-speak. A lot of words were used to make it sound like "I took my daddy's company and ran it into bankruptcy" is a story of unquestionable success.
I agree. We all knew that once he lost his equity in the company, there was no point in staying. He lost control over the company his father founded. Same thing happened to Lew Dickey. The only smart one was Lowry Mays, who was able to cash out in 2008 before the industry collapsed.
David was one of the few radio owners who believed in local radio. Even in bankruptcy, Audacy are more live & local than any other big company stations. It'll be interesting to see if they'll be able to maintain that distinction.
The last court case having to do with the Audacy bankruptcy is over:
www.insideradio.com
So technically the financial and legal part of the process is over. The new FCC commissioner wants to revisit the deal because he doesn't like one of the investors. He wants to blow it up and add more expense to the process.
Here's a quote from Louisiana Senator Kennedy:
I didn't know that God created the FCC. They must have a different kind of education in Louisiana. This is the same guy who wants to destroy public broadcasting.
The Audacy Chapter 11 Reorganization Officially Comes To An End In Court.
Just a little more than a year after Audacy went into bankruptcy court with a plan to rework its debt and emerge as a more financially stable company, the last
So technically the financial and legal part of the process is over. The new FCC commissioner wants to revisit the deal because he doesn't like one of the investors. He wants to blow it up and add more expense to the process.
Here's a quote from Louisiana Senator Kennedy:
I didn't know that God created the FCC. They must have a different kind of education in Louisiana. This is the same guy who wants to destroy public broadcasting.
The general response I've been seeing from employees has been, "Don't let the screen door hit you."
I do, however, agree that it may be a case of "be careful what you wish for." Bad manager that he was, David Field was also more committed to live and local than most of his peers. His replacement may not be.
I'd heard a name of a rumored potential replacement a little over a year ago. If that person is still interested or in the running, (s)he had a similar philosophy to Field on local radio and would almost certainly be well-liked by Audacy employees. No guarantee that will be the person they get, though.
Now that they are out of bankruptcy and Fields is out, I suspect they will look at getting Latino Media Network and putting those stations in the fold, since all fit except for one AM in Miami. (Because of the Soros connection with both companies) LMN has cut drastically after spending a great deal on management unfamiliar with the industry and how budget planning is based.
The stations could be added with minimal investment. Only Fresno and RGV are the markets Audacy is not in and the San Antonio AM can be run by the Austin group. They also wouldn't be adding much talent since LMN has little talent on air.
The stations could be added with minimal investment. Only Fresno and RGV are the markets Audacy is not in and the San Antonio AM can be run by the Austin group. They also wouldn't be adding much talent since LMN has little talent on air.
All that would do is drag down the value of the company, and take money from good stations and give it to bad ones. What LMN should do is sell those stations and go out of business. It was a good idea that was done badly. The reason iHeart and Cumulus are still losing money is because they're stuck with a bunch of boat-anchor AMs. Cumulus owns four of them in San Francisco. None of them make money. Terrible idea.
I suppose you'd also have to define "bad". If you believe one job of a chief executive is to manage risks then, yeah, Field misjudged the risk of revenue collapse and of overextending the company financially. He wasn't the only one. But on other criteria, live and local being one of them, Field seemed to be better than average. In retrospect, the fatal decision was the CBS radio acquisition. Why did he do it? Prestige? Keeping up with the bigger chains? A sense of custodial responsibility? Who knows? He certainly didn't seem to approach it from the angle of brutal cost cutting to attain strategic advantage the way iHeart has done. Of course, he did have to cut costs. A company will do whatever it must to survive. But that did not appear to be his primary motivation.
As for the language in the press release, consider the motivations on each side. Field wants to come out of this looking better than the common perception of his tenure. The new leadership doesn't want to get sued. It also needs to line up new executive management; no point in scaring off potential candidates for those roles. So of course the press release is going to accentuate the positive. It's up to the outlets reporting the information in the press release to provide the fuller context for Field's departure.
I know him personally. I’ve done interviews with him for 10 years. He’s a hoot to say the least 🤣
Prior to going to the senate, he was the Louisiana state treasurer. He knows how much his state depends on federal funding to stay afloat. He also knows that God didn't create the FCC. If he worked in radio, he'd know why.
One of my friends essentially said the message we should be getting from this is how bad being a public company truly is. He mentioned that Audacy was profitable and successful, but being profitable and successful weren't enough. It had to keep growing and growing until it took on a debt load right before a major recession that made it unsustainable.
From my own admittedly limited personal experiences at publicly traded companies, it's hard for me to argue against that perspective. I've only worked for two publicly traded companies, only one of which (Cumulus) was radio, and neither was a good experience. The CEO's valued their shareholders over all else, and they were more than willing to make long-term bad moves to satisfy the shareholders in the immediate. I realize that, when I worked in telecommunications, there was a certain optimism in the mid-to-late 90's that the long-term didn't need to be considered because value was going to keep growing, and that increased value would make the problems down the road relatively cheaper and less damaging to solve. Problem is, we should've learned that didn't work by the beginning of 2003 after the stock market had tanked and Enron and Worldcom, both darling stocks, had gone bankrupt. I've seen little to convince me the people in charge at most public companies learned anything at all from that.
Outside of maybe WAQI, who'd want those AMs? LMN was basically built on stations Univision didn't even want. It worked out handsomely for Univision, but I cannot see anyone or any investment firm having any desire to set millions of dollars of fire just to bail LMN out of a mistake they never should have made.
It might be more practical for LMN to sell only the FM stations and surrender all of the AM licenses.
The reason I believe they would put the all together is the Soros factor. That being said, they could move the few Spanish language stations to LMN and have it focus primarily on the Hispanic market. But the point of the AMs is valid. They got rid of TUDN programming that was airing on the AMs because of the deal with TelevisaUnivision and are playing music on them now.
Not if he's forced out by the FCC. That's their intent, according to the incoming FCC Chairman.
From the above linked article:
Wouldn't surprise me if this results in Audacy collapsing outright because this repells anyone from wanting to finance them. Why would anyone want to own or finance a radio or television station if Carr wants to act like a petty mafia don?
Certainly looks like David Field saw the writing on the wall.
Certainly looks like David Field saw the writing on the wall.
WAQI is almost totally dead now. The "star" hosts moved to other Spanish language talk stations in the market.
This whole deal was like having the city pay YOU to come and take away your trash.
Several of the FMs are useless. And the only ones with half-decent signals are in Harlingen and Fresno... which says it all
My entire career in radio was at family-run companies. Much of my IT/cybersecurity career was at publicly traded companies, but most instructive is the privately-owned company I worked for. But first, about that radio experience: all companies except one were seriously screwed up. One was owned by someone who had been there for decades, wanted to retire, but wanted too much for the station, so he just stuck around. In the meantime, he rejected almost any new idea, even in the face of increasing competition and a changing market. The one in the Hudson Valley was owned by crooks who were in love with their egotistical program director, who could do no wrong and who undercut anyone who questioned him. The one in a major market was owned by a prominent family as a prestige object but who had hired a former program director as GM, thereby proving the venerable Peter Principle of someone being promoted above their level of competence. That GM liked to pit people against each other and thought he was God's great gift to management. Not a single one of these operations was corporate. If they had been, some of the nonsense that happened wouldn't have occurred.
As for my second career, the instructive case is that of Hallmark Cards, still mostly held by the Hall family. It was a wonderful company when I was there. No one was ever laid off. Benefits were generous. The culture was full of creative, kind people, even in so-called "non-creative" positions. People generally stayed for life. We "non-creatives" didn't get some of the perks that the artists, writers, and designers got, but we were probably paid better. All production was in the U.S., mostly either Kansas or Missouri. Nothing was outsourced. Problem was, the products being sold were starting to hit demographic dead ends. Younger people weren't interested in greeting cards, gift wrap, and so on. Sound familiar?
The benchmark everyone went by was the annual corporate profit-sharing contribution, expressed as additional percentage of salary. The last year that percentage hit double-digits was 1990. It gradually declined as sales became more difficult. Meantime, new ideas were often shot down this way: "It will hurt the profit sharing." Around 2000, after I left to join the first Bay Area tech boom, serious cost-cutting began. Most of IT was outsourced. Retiree benefits were cut. Manufacturing moved to China. Rinse and repeat. Sound familiar?
Being publicly traded is no inoculation against that particular syndrome. But, in theory, there should be a board of directors representing the shareholders' interests in ensuring the viability of their company and in getting ahead of trends. At one time directors considered other constituencies as well. But the 1980s brought new theories out of the prestigious business schools and stuffed those ideas into the heads of a legion of MBAs. If you wanted to undermine a society, letting MBAs loose to run businesses is an effective way of going about it. The stock price became what mattered to publicly traded companies.
Even so, from my experience, I'd rather work for a publicly traded company. At least there's some commitment to the notion of balancing and managing risks, and to making sure the right people are running the company. There's a professionalism that's often lacking in family-owned businesses. The need to publish financial results and explain them brings some transparency to company operations. If you pay attention, you can see opportunities, resources, and capabilities that you can learn from. In one publicly traded company, I went from being a firewall engineer to a managing director and from there, went to another company as a chief information security officer. I did these things because I wanted to learn. I don't think I would have had those opportunities at a private company, not even at Hallmark, though I learned quite a bit there, too.
Boards of directors don't always live up to what's expected of them; I found that out when I had to deal with one, at an S&P 500 company. But that company has generally been quite successful, and the stock price has kept going up and up. So my idealistic nature has to give way to my pragmatic attributes, and acknowledge that the board picked the right people to run the company.
What can be tricky is when a family-owned operation decides it needs capital that it doesn't want to get through lending and decides to go public. Then compliance burdens enter the picture. But it all depends. I've seen situations where the founder stays around and provides stability and cultural touchstones (don't underestimate that); I've seen situations where the family participation in ownership just creates a mess. One may not see that until the company is under stress, because success can cover up numerous faults. I suspect something like that happened to Entercom/Audacy: the environment became one of severe financial stress, and risks taken in more successful times turned out to be unmanageable.
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