Torey Malatia, who was at WBEZ in Chicago for 20 years, most of those years as GM, is out. The station's board has seemed to ask him to leave in response to the station's recent monetary and ratings problems (while many NPR news/talkers are breathing down the necks of established AM stations and in a few instances, like SF and DC, beating them or being very competitive with them) and it seems that it was a surprise to most station employees:
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/arti...chief-torey-malatia-ousted-from-radio-station
It's not mentioned, but I believe that Malatia's Achilles heel in recent years was his continuing support of Vocalo, the web site/programming on NW Indiana's WBEW (and recently on South Side ten-watter WRTE, which Chicago Public Media bought from the Mexican Fine Arts Museum last year) that attempted to be public radio for young, diverse hipsters and has been about as successful as every other attempt public radio has made at young demo programming ("Fair Game," "Bryant Park Project," "Takeaway"). I don't suspect Vocalo will be around at this time next year.
Although Malatia got the station moved out of the notorious "Radio Beirut" in the Loop from their Board of Education days and into their digs at Navy Pier and made the station a player in national programming with "This American Life," "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!" and "Sound Opinions," his legacy to some of the station's longtime listeners seems to be more the dropping of music programming, notably jazz (even though his predecessor as PD Ken Davis was planning to do the exact same thing back in 1992--one would think that Malatia would be congratulated for giving jazz programming 15 more years of life) and seemingly any and all other programming changes or staff departures over the years--and the comments on the link above and other articles I've read today seem to bear that out, as the jazz fans celebrate, claim that Malatia "ruined" the station and hope that jazz will be coming back to BEZ. Sorry guys, but jazz is NOT coming back to BEZ any time soon. And unless the GM and PD were totally clueless, what Malatia did would be done any ANY OTHER GM or PD. And that's why I didn't post this on the Chicago board.
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/arti...chief-torey-malatia-ousted-from-radio-station
It's not mentioned, but I believe that Malatia's Achilles heel in recent years was his continuing support of Vocalo, the web site/programming on NW Indiana's WBEW (and recently on South Side ten-watter WRTE, which Chicago Public Media bought from the Mexican Fine Arts Museum last year) that attempted to be public radio for young, diverse hipsters and has been about as successful as every other attempt public radio has made at young demo programming ("Fair Game," "Bryant Park Project," "Takeaway"). I don't suspect Vocalo will be around at this time next year.
Although Malatia got the station moved out of the notorious "Radio Beirut" in the Loop from their Board of Education days and into their digs at Navy Pier and made the station a player in national programming with "This American Life," "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!" and "Sound Opinions," his legacy to some of the station's longtime listeners seems to be more the dropping of music programming, notably jazz (even though his predecessor as PD Ken Davis was planning to do the exact same thing back in 1992--one would think that Malatia would be congratulated for giving jazz programming 15 more years of life) and seemingly any and all other programming changes or staff departures over the years--and the comments on the link above and other articles I've read today seem to bear that out, as the jazz fans celebrate, claim that Malatia "ruined" the station and hope that jazz will be coming back to BEZ. Sorry guys, but jazz is NOT coming back to BEZ any time soon. And unless the GM and PD were totally clueless, what Malatia did would be done any ANY OTHER GM or PD. And that's why I didn't post this on the Chicago board.