And single station transactions are of limited value unless it means pulling out of a market. It is hard to operate in any larger market today without a full cluster.
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Audacy Stock Trading Halted
- Thread starter JJSPC
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What happened with iHeart was a rather massive reorganization of the business in the wake of their bankruptcy. Well...another reorganization.
No, he did not know that. It was prior to the pandemic and the quasi-recession we are in.
And a Reverse Morris transaction is not a merger. It is a purchase. In effect, it is a deal with the shareholders of one company to take shares in a different company as part of their equity when that company separate an operating division.
No, it sounds like poor timing and an excess of optimism.
BigA has posted that they can't work out of this with spot sales today, and Audacy is behind in new media development and diversification.
Because they followed layoffs by CBS. This is a 3 station cluster of which two of the stations were in trouble.
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Longtime PHOENIX radio host STEVE GODDARD has exited the 1-6p slot at CBS RADIO Classic Hits KOOL/PHOENIX, reports the ARIZONA REPUBLIC. GODDARD was let go on MONDAY (3/6), posting "Left Job at CBS RADIO" on his Facebook page, and he told the REPUBLIC's RANDY CORDOVA that "Yesterday at 12:15...
How many morning teams did the country station go through during a 5 year period?
They've since turned things around, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're looking to add some people now.
I wonder if David Field wonders sometime if time travel existed, would he go back in time to February 1, 2017 and stop himself from announcing the CBS deal the next day?
Exactly. Audacy will still exist after Q3 '24 when debt comes due. Just remains to be seen in what form.
That's why they would rather swap stations around in order to strengthen clusters where needed. As far as selling stations, as someone who grew up loving AM, I truly believe they would be better off selling off some of their AMs to anyone with a pulse and a somewhat reasonable offer. WMC 790 in Memphis comes to mind for me. Sports betting might appeal to 5 guys nursing a beer at Southland Greyhound Park in West Memphis still waiting for their dogs to cross the line, but I doubt it's setting the sales sheets on fire.
So CBS laid off all the positions I listed. Entercom had nothing to do with that. Got it.
As for the country station, I'd lay that at the feet of the program director, but what do I know?
Earlier, you implied I was being intractable in my position regarding the future of radio, and yes...I've already admitted I'm not bullish. I would say that now you're being rather immovable on the responsibility of Entercom/Audacy for their current predicament. Oddly so. You seem to want to lay blame at the feet of everyone and everything but them.
Yes, they did make some reductions, but most were related to duplicate positions.
Even at the local level, the reductions were mostly due to overlap. For example, the national sales managers at each station and cluster were consolidated into regional or national staff that did national agency and buying service sales for multiple stations.
But that was mostly related to the fact that they were combining two companies. For example, in a market where both Entercom and CBS had stations, they did not need two managers or GSMs, accountants and so on.
And they had some people from CBS who had been there so long their salaries were just unreasonable.... a certain PD in LA was a good example.
At the time, most of us in the industry admired him for putting together a creative deal. Heck, I had never heard of a Reverse Morris transaction before!
Just consider that if some of the debt is exchanged for equity, the interest on the remaining debt is much less. That alone might give considerable breathing room.
Remember, sports in general taps into money that is not "radio dollars" but "sports marketing dollars" from other budget categories. I'll bet WMC is producing more than the sale price of the facility could generate.
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If you go back through this thread, you'll see lots of very critical posts (#67) from me about Audacy. Starting with the fact that they're a very traditional locally-oriented radio company. They believe strongly in local talent and local sales autonomy. They're not big on digital content, and they could use digital revenue now. The problem with your market was that two out of three stations were in the hole, so they were overstaffed for that level of revenue. I chuckled when you mentioned having a local HR director and comptroller. I doubt there are many 3 station clusters today with that kind of office staff. Most radio companies centralize HR. That was obviously a holdover from CBS. But they didn't give up trying, and they finally hit on the right mix of talent for the country station. Most other owners would have given up.
And the reorganization was due to the way radio was going through a transition from pure OTA services to new channels and distribution systems.
Bankruptcy or not, there would have been a need for much of that.
I'm not saying "it's all due to reorganization due to a changing market" but that a lot of it was.
Ironically, they ended up hiring him back,
My point in this thread is that Audacy needs to do the same thing. Except I don't see them heading in that direction.
Many groups, even those in only three or four markets, have centralized a lot of their operations.
One example is traffic: instead of having local staff do logs and billing, a group has a central office just for that. They don't worry about the "traffic person" being sick on Friday or vacation issues as the central location is set up to have an optimum staffing that makes sure that there are enough people so that vacations, sick days and turnover are covered without a loss of efficiency.
The same is done with national sales (if the market is big enough to get national and regional sales), production, accounting, creative /copywriting, HR and other functions that can be shared.
Even in engineering, a group does not need a "top level" engineer who can design an antenna system or a new transmitter installation. They have one super-tech and people who can keep things running at each station.
Some companies even centralize music scheduling and the group record libraries. As technology advances, the way business is done changes too.
Betcha' it was for a bit less than the near 7-figure package he had before.
The best contrasting comparison is between Audacy and Townsquare. One did not take advantage of technology and adapt to a changing market, the other did.
I'm sure you're right, because this time he's only in charge of one station, not three.
Who also oversees IT and scheduling.
You do understand that going private means either the company shares become worthless after a bankruptcy, or the need to buy all the traded shares back? A little tough to buy shares back without a lot of additional debt or excess disposable cash on hand.
And I chuckled when you said Entercom doesn't lay off local staff So I guess we're even?
Yeah, no kidding. I said I was one of the first layoffs. IIRC the first one was the person responsible for digital content, and (I'm hoping this has changed) their digital sales department was one person.
But the larger issue is definitely that at the beginning of 2018 a 20 dollar bill could buy you 2 shares of Audacy stock. Now it would buy you 200.
I'm also the guy who said David Field didn't like CBS. Had your market been Rochester, you likely would have survived.
Buying all the shares is less than $10 million. When it comes to corporate finance, a rounding error.
When your revenue is $100M a year? One Hell of a rounding error, don't you think?
Audacy had $1.21 billion in revenue last year. Correct figures can be found on Page 29 of their annual report.
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