lkeller
Hiring the best person for the job is an excellent concept in good times and bad times. That's what Clear Channel thinks its doing...regardless of the economy. JV has name recognition and unless he performs poorly, will bring in a bigger audience for Wild. It especially makes sense if they're entering into a head-to-head competition with MOViN.
I'm sure they're paying JV more than the fill-in guy, but I'll bet he's getting a lot less money than he did a few years ago.
CC may be the heart-less Satan of radio, and it sounds like they've handled the lay-offs insensitively (to say the least) in some markets. But the economic reality is - layoffs are necessary in this economy now for many companies to survive.
I work in a public sector agency where people have relative job security...basically you have to be totally incompetent to be laid off during a good economy. But I guarantee there will be layofffs this coming year where I work.[/i]
I could be wrong but there seems to be an assumption in these responses that the people who got laid off were of lesser caliber. I have no idea how good they were at their jobs so I can't say one way or the other but as anyone in radio knows, you can get fired whether you're good or bad at your job. It's hard to imagine the dozens of people Clear Channel fired in this state were all bad employees but I can't help wondering if there were some shell games played with budgets in the Bay Area to say, "Hey, if we fire enough people here, we can hire JV there!" That's a lousy way to do things --the insensitivity Keller mentioned. Look, if JV is good, and he certainly has equity in this market, hire him irrespective of budgets elsewhere. Like Keller said, hiring the best person for the job is an excellent concept regardless of the economy.
And it's never a good idea to hire anyone who's dead weight, good times or bad. When Baller says he laid off a guy who "just punched the clock," the first question that comes to mind is, "Why did he get hired in the first place?" Were there that many careless hires because times were good?
When you're in a situation where the money is good and things are good, you have a tendency to get a bit reckless about the present and you tend to pay less attention to what's going to happen in the future. Why does it take a slow economoy to figure out you hired dead weight. Maybe we should be firing the people who hired that dead weight. Hope that's not you!
Cutting jobs is a tough call fraught with risk. It rarely makes up for the loss of revenue and while it's an easy answer, it's also short-sighted because you risk completely destroying your operation to the point where your product deteriorates and you lose customers, or in radio's case, listeners (same difference, really). It's a lot harder to get that product back than to get the revenue back. The Doghouse is a perfect case in point; Wild has never been the same after they dumped the Doghouse. Did they save money on all those hefty salaries? Maybe for a while. Now they've got a dogs*** station and even worse, they've fallen behind. Radio has fallen behind.
In the years the industry has cut short term losses and diminished and devalued the product, other music choices like iPods and online platforms came to prominence. We like to say in radio that the industry adopted a business model that destroyed its farm system for up-and-coming announcers. Have they done that for their listeners, too? It's not a scientific survey but I can't tell you how many times I've run into some high school or college-aged guy who hasn't listened to the radio in years, or maybe has never listened. At the same time radio stopped giving them a reason to listen, other options became more attractive.
It invites another question: Can JV reverse that for Wild? What level of achievement, what goal would he have to reach, to call his return successful? They say you can't go home again. Can he? And will that generate enough revenue to re-hire the ones who were laid off?
