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Rochester Rochester layoffs

R

RetiredGuy

The iHeart cluster in Rochester has laid off three personalities, Julie Dunn, Mark Maira and Jeremy Newman (Newman had already planned to leave for Texas at the end of his contract this fall). There are now no regular locally originated shows on any of the cluster's five FMs. Dunn was program director for two of them, and also voice tracked for Y94 in Syracuse.
 
WHAM AM is the only iHeart station in the top 5. None of their other stations cracks a 2.5 share. They're simply not competitive anymore in the most popular formats in the market.
 
SirRoxalot said:
WHAM AM is the only iHeart station in the top 5. None of their other stations cracks a 2.5 share. They're simply not competitive anymore in the most popular formats in the market.
Click to expand...
They're probably counting on the other clusters to eventually make deep cuts and to also start sucking, which will make iHeart competitive again in the race for that lower bar.
 
They've tried cutting their way to prosperity before. Cutting people who create the reason to listen means lower ratings. Lower ratings mean less revenue. The revenue decreases more than the operating costs do, which mean less profit. Yeah, they'll get a temporary boost to their stock price from people who don't know the business or who haven't noticed their past performance. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of iHeartMedia's shares 5 years ago would now be looking at only $149.85 today.

It will take a while for shareholders to catch on. They've made several moves during the latest cost-cutting wave. They're switching to Audiograph with promises that you can target an audience more precisely, most likely based on online listening. They're pushing people toward their app and away from towers and transmitters. Maybe they're ahead of the curve on that. Maybe they're not as people are becoming more resistant to giving up their data. If you're going to listen on an app, why listen to iHeart? There are plenty of other sources with a lot fewer commercials.

They're cutting salespeople out of the loop by offering advertising through Amazon's ad buying platform. It's allased on numbers like all other digital advertising. It's very hard to measure how effective those numbers really are, and there's very little human interaction to establish relationships and guide ad buys.

Short term, Pittman and a handful at the top get to keep their cushy jobs. Long term, their properties get even more robotic, and they get an excuse to lean even more heavily on AI, perfecting their goal of saying nothing meaningful to local audiences. With luck, they can reduce their content to a dozen streaming formats and employ bots to create locally-targeted advertising to those who find AI slop appealing.
 


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