I can trace my exit from depending on radio for full-time employment to one event. The corporate CEO of my station's chain buzzed into town and called a meeting to tell us "The stations are NOT for sale!" Only a couple of months later, he came back to announce that HE had purchased the chain in a leveraged buy-out. Not long after that, they came through with a list of jobs, generated by the lender who finanaced the purchase. If your job description wasn't on that list, you were gone. Ratings, loyalty, talent, productivity... none of that mattered; if your job title wasn't on the computer printout, prepared by someone who had probably never even been in a radio station, you were toast. I was a survivor, but noted that our continutity director, a close friend of the GM, and only recently lured over from the competition, was not. My thought was that if she got canned, the next time around no one was safe. That, for me, was the point where I realized that radio had ceased to be run by radio people, and the banks and lenders were in the driver's seat.
The funny thing about that is... that was 1988!
