Lots of layoffs

[Surfer]

With Clear Channel and Cumulus cutting folks, everybody is screaming that all the good people are cut. I'm playing devil's advocate here with this one...Did it ever occur to anybody that they were being cut due to redundancy of job duties, high salary or, simply, because the owners don't like them? Face it, in broadcasting, you're only as good as the audience ratings say you are and, if your one of the administrative folks, there will ALWAYS be somebody who will do your job cheaper and, in some cases, better.

I'm not saying I like this. Heck, if I were cut I'd hate it too. The fact is the economy stinks around the world and in order for a business to survive, sometimes people gotta go. Callous, perhaps. Good business, maybe. Unfortunate for those cut, absolutely. But, having been the victim of these cuts several times I can honestly say I am far the better person for it. Eventually we all have to face this and radio is becoming a medium where one person, with the help of technology, can do the work of 3, 4 or 5. Do CEO's and the like make too much money? I don't know...if I can get my company that I manager for a bunch of stockholders to consistently make money, which increases their investment and makes them more money, which then allows me to make more money, why not? Oh, right, it's capitalism and we're not supposed to like that. Frankly my dear...I'll take the cash.

 

[TheBigA]

Another part of it is that Clear Channel is transitioning into some new media. That means they need fewer people on air and more handling various online services. That requires special talents that some radio employees don't have.

We're also seeing the death of AM Radio. It's been fading for about 30 years, and there are some markets where there are no AMs showing up in the ratings. Devoting a lot of staff to a dying technology is wasteful.

Ironically these cuts came on the same day that Brent Bozelle of the Media Research Group repeated his call for the defunding of public radio.

 

[TomT]

And the death of FM radio? Many of the firings are of midday/afternoon talent at the CC stations.

 

[TheBigA]

Depends on the format. What we're seeing in the PPM markets is negative reaction to air talent in those dayparts in certain music formats.

So a third factor that I forgot to mention in my post is PPM ratings for music radio.

 

[RadioStarOne]

Today is not a great time to be in radio! Thanks Mr. Clinton!

 

[TheBigA]

Today is not a great time to be in radio! Thanks Mr. Clinton!

You really think things would have been better under a Republican? Ever hear of Michael Powell? Know what he wanted to do?

How about Kevin Martin. He tried to expand de-regulation.

Listen to what the current candidates want to do. Eliminate regulation. Allow businesses to do what they want. Get the government out of broadcasting. Defund public radio. Allow more commercialization.

Election day is one year and one week away. Keep that in mind.

 

[Tom Wells]

When capitalism becomes just another means of coercion, it's no more honorable than any other blunt instrument.

Abolish corporate personhood or be resolved to enjoy a future that greatly resembles indentured servitude.

 

[WPPCProductions]

Corruption is the word kids.saying it kindly.I feel sorry for you guys that work for corporate radio firms.They are like Walmarts of the broadcasting industry.They only are about the mighty dollar not you.And fund our friends campaign funds this time of the year.Soon all corporate owned stations will be operating out of one studio with a mega automation computers with 1,000 plus digital voice tracked voices running on the air when needed.Digital control for the transmitters.A digital voice will call the Engineer when problems arise.Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie.But its coming soon.

Yes the 1996 Telecommunications act did not help.

 

[SirRoxalot]

You want the real problem?

Once you scratch and claw (or daddy buys) your way into the top floor of the executive offices, there are no consequences.

You can virtually never go wrong by cutting expenses - even if the cuts mean even deeper drops in revenue. Even if somebody recognizes that you screwed up, you simply blame somebody else, and throw them under the bus. lf the company loses money, you get a "bonus" because they didn't lose MORE money. If the company goes bankrupt, you get a bonus for "guiding them through restructuring".

What's the worst case scenario? You're jettisoned with a platinum parachute and tens of millions of dollars. You sit on the sidelines for a little R&R, then move on to the next "troubled" group with promises that make bankers heart go pit-a-pat.

Imagine what would happen if top execs were monetarily penalized when their companies lost money. Imagine if Boards of Directors were forced to resign if that happened for several quarters in a row. Now THERE'S a John Lennon song for you.

 

[NewsStud]

Did it ever occur to anybody that they were being cut due to redundancy of job duties, high salary...

When Clear Channel begins to eliminate their redundant layers of executives and salespeople, I'll take their actions more seriously. And I mean that from a business standpoint, not an ex-airstaff standpoint.

Clear Channel keeps eliminating people who really don't cost much, yet do much of the actual legwork of creating the product of which they sell to advertisers.

Their local plants barely have enough programming, production, news, traffic staffers. Yet on the sales side, account reps are fighting each other for whatever business is out there. Each station in the cluster has its own sales manager, who reports to BOTH a local sales manager and national sales manager, who in turn report to a Director of Sales for the Cluster, who in turn reports to the GM *and* regional VP of sales. Is that really necessary? Do you need all those people making six figures to make sure one of your thirty sales lemmings convinces Wally's Car Wash to buy ten minutes each weekday? And do you really need thirty sales lemmings in one market? Barely anybody will make their draw and potential buyers get frustrated that seventeen people from the same company keep knocking on their door.

But fire the production kid making 30K. That'll keep you out of the red and help you compete with Pandora.

 

[davideduardo]

Do you need all those people making six figures to make sure one of your thirty sales lemmings convinces Wally's Car Wash to buy ten minutes each weekday? And do you really need thirty sales lemmings in one market? Barely anybody will make their draw and potential buyers get frustrated that seventeen people from the same company keep knocking on their door.

The best way to explain this to someone who thinks sellers are somehow inferior to on-air and programming folks is to say that salespeople are best thought of as independent contractors. Their pay is based on what they bring in, of which they get a cut.

Salespeople are at high risk. If they don't bring in enough to justify the training and supervisory costs, they get cut loose. If they don't get enough business from the accounts they are assigned, they get cut loose. If they don't do well in training, they get cut loose. If they don't follow through on each sales and give good service, they get cut loose.

So a station will have as many sellers as is needed to cover all the potential business. If there are not enough, then a station misses out on business, and revenue is lower than it should be.

The commissions paid to sellers is very much related to what sellers can make selling the local cable system, the yellow pages, print, TV, deal of the day operators, etc. So what a good seller makes (and bad sellers don't make $100 k) is whatever it takes to make them interested in radio rather than some other medium or something outside of media.

What jocks and production people make is relative to what it would take to get a comparable person with the same qualifications. There is a bigger supply of programming people than good sellers. So guess who makes more?

Clusters often field separate sales crews for each station. Otherwise, there is a tendency to sell the easy station, the one with the highest profile and biggest ratings. Or to sell the station the client "likes to listen to" and not the one they should be on to sell. Stations compete, within a cluster, for audience. They often compete for revenue.

Other companies have a single sale force, and they incentivize sellers to push the "rest of the cluster" with higher commissions on harder sells, or more commission for multi-station buys or similar ways of making sure the littlest station is not forgotten.

Sales management trains, assigns accounts, does 4-legged calls, checks competitive monitors, sets rates, analyzes inventory usage and conveys avail data to sellers, works on late pays and collection accounts, works with local and corporate on budgets, helps prepare sales material, takes calls to resolve client issues such as "my copy did not run..." or "your salesperson said I'd get lots of spots in morning drive." And lots more, too.

The more accounts and the more sellers a cluster has, the more managers there will be. There are tons of theories about how many people can be supervised by one person in different job functions, but the fact is that you need enough supervisors... in this case sales managers... to effectively utilize the sales staff. And these numbers are, to some extent, self-regulating in that the number of sellers is really determined by how much incremental revenue you can get by adding more sellers.

Good sellers are skilled, talented people. They are not lemmings. That's an offensive term.

 

[bossbill]

I recognize there are many, many talented people in this business, but even the best on-air talents don't always understand that all the talent in the world is of little use unless the $$$ comes in. And unfortunately, the worst on-air product in town will still generate revenues, quite possibly with a higher net.

The cost of sales personnel is directly related to revenues; the cost of talent is not.

We have far too many radio stations. Remember back when there was something called "scarcity of spectrum"? Small markets that could barely support two stations back in the AM days now have half a dozen or more. With more stations chasing the available advertising dollar, something has to give.

Here's a hot idea: maybe the FCC should dictate that major market clusters must have at least one of their stations live and local 24/7.

 

[TheBigA]

Here's a hot idea: maybe the FCC should dictate that major market clusters must have at least one of their stations live and local 24/7.

That kind of requirement is outside their purview. And definitely outside their interest.

Today, the FCC is only interested in ways to make money from the spectrum. The latest is their spectrum tax, and it's part of the current budget discussions in DC. The president's jobs bill contained new FCC authority to impose billions in spectrum fees on wireless companies and radio broadcasters over the next decade.

 

[Tom Wells]

Here's a hot idea: maybe the FCC should dictate that major market clusters must have at least one of their stations live and local 24/7.

That kind of requirement is outside their purview. And definitely outside their interest.

Today, the FCC is only interested in ways to make money from the spectrum. The latest is their spectrum tax, and it's part of the current budget discussions in DC. The president's jobs bill contained new FCC authority to impose billions in spectrum fees on wireless companies and radio broadcasters over the next decade.

They're not too interested, or they could be taxing a whole lot of people that think they don't owe anybody anything
while their "business" destroys radio and TV reception over wide areas.

The agency has no interest in doing their job anymore, but seems too busy collecting fees from
"users" while not punishing "abusers".

Proper behavior would be to FINE the polluters, who mostly have no regard for any RF services, then
fund the cleanup of more RF noise.

But still no fines or teeth of any kind to regulate RF pollution from bad engineering and
application of AC power handling devices.

Wouldn't you love to see the giant shopping mall pay fines for the noise their lighting creates and then
have the FCC send you a check to put toward a new radial system?
That's how it should be working.


The FCC is like a state policeman on an interstate highway that can only stop commercial vehicles.
No amount of reckless behavior by any of the other vehicles on the road is noted or acted upon.
The commercial vehicles must comply and obey or risk fines, but all the other vehicles on the road, no matter
how dangerous or recklessly driven, simply get a pass because these vehicles are unlicensed yet they
are still on the same highway.

The FCC was supposed to make sure that all these other devices "on the highway" made NO RF NOISE, or they could not be sold in this country. We see how well they have managed that.

Why should I believe the FCC cares about spectrum at all?
I don't think I've ever heard of an industrial user being fined for destroying reception, yet stations are often fined.
The NAB should be really ashamed, too, for being "of no help whatsoever".

 

[KFodor]

Here's a hot idea: maybe the FCC should dictate that major market clusters must have at least one of their stations live and local 24/7.

That kind of requirement is outside their purview. And definitely outside their interest.

Today, the FCC is only interested in ways to make money from the spectrum. The latest is their spectrum tax, and it's part of the current budget discussions in DC. The president's jobs bill contained new FCC authority to impose billions in spectrum fees on wireless companies and radio broadcasters over the next decade.

Which, of course will also cause more jobs to be cut in the business, as radio finds ways to pay for those billions in fees. Think of that, too...

 

[firepoint525]

We have far too many radio stations. Remember back when there was something called "scarcity of spectrum"? Small markets that could barely support two stations back in the AM days now have half a dozen or more. With more stations chasing the available advertising dollar, something has to give.

I can't argue with that, but while the county in which I grew up had just two stations, one AM and one FM (not jointly owned), there are still only two radio station corporations operating in that county, running a total of four stations there, not to mention their holdings in neighboring counties. And this in a county where the population growth has stagnated. More business(es) there now, but really not anymore people living there.

 

[firepoint525]

I'm beginning to wonder if all these large broadcasting corporations are also laying off the local sales staffs of all their individual stations. Seems like I never hear local ads for local businesses anymore. Only the stuff with the 800 number repeated at least three times. We've always heard these types of ads during syndicated/network programming, but it seems that they are increasingly infiltrating "local" programming, as well. I wouldn't have even noticed this, except that one such corporation periodically has "cattle calls" for new sales positions, yet I still never hear local ads for local businesses on their stations, which leads me to believe that the corporations are now selling ads nationwide at the corporate level for ALL their stations.

 

[TheBigA]

I'm beginning to wonder if all these large broadcasting corporations are also laying off the local sales staffs of all their individual stations. Seems like I never hear local ads for local businesses anymore.

That's an important point. One major change in the media world has been the demise of strictly local business. In the old days, every town had several local department stores that were only in that town, and the owner lived in that town. Not any more. Now there's Macy's, Pennys, Sears, and Wal Mart. Which one is local? Used to be all the restaurants were local. Not any more. Same with hardware, furniture, and drug stores. Even barber & beauty shops are chains. The national chains buy their advertising from agencies, not local radio stations. The local sales people focus on the few remaining local businesses, like car dealerships (which are becoming regional) and lawyers offices. It's really a big problem, and one reason why radio stations are changing their focus from local origination to national.

The other thing is that sales people get paid by commission. So a station can have a lot more sales people than on-air because sales people only get paid for what they sell.

 

[NHRadio]

Digital control for the transmitters.A digital voice will call the Engineer when problems arise.

Those things have existed for years.

 

[bossbill]

The national chains buy their advertising from agencies, not local radio stations. The local sales people focus on the few remaining local businesses, like car dealerships (which are becoming regional) and lawyers offices. It's really a big problem, and one reason why radio stations are changing their focus from local origination to national.

The other thing is that sales people get paid by commission. So a station can have a lot more sales people than on-air because sales people only get paid for what they sell.

National chains have agencies with 20-year-old buyers. They buy major markets and do it all by the "numbers". They also buy the networks, and have figured out that they can buy bulk from Dial-Global and ABC/Citadel/Cumulus and reach most of the country. Of course the local stations see none of that because it's barter for the programming.