And something that isn’t connected to the sale of a certain sports radio outlet:
OMW had been hearing rumblings of cuts last Friday at the now-former CBS Radio outlets in Columbus, which were taken over by Wilks Broadcasting that day.
Unfortunately, those rumblings turned out to be true at the stations, country WHOK/95.5 “K95”, rock WLVQ/96.3 “QFM96” and alt-rock WAZU/107.1 “The Big Wazoo”.
AllAccess reports that cluster operations manager Dave Cooper is out, along with WHOK news director Kim Taylor and night personality Heather Black, WLVQ traffic reporter “Officer Al” and assistant program director/midday personality Dave Man, along with cluster engineer John Marocchi.
Staying in Columbus, where we were still waiting for confirmation on one reported layoff at the Clear Channel cluster there – WLZT/93.3 “Lite FM” programmer Steve Cherry.
Unfortunately, that appears to have come true, shortly after he became a new father – his wife Anna (middayer at sister 80’s rocker WBRW/105.7 “The Brew”) gave birth to a new son.
Unfortunately, there’s even more job loss news in this item.
OMW told you earlier of a number of people let go from Clear Channel’s Cincinnati cluster. It appears “a number” wasn’t nearly as high as it should have been.
In an item which gave us a lot of pause, Cincinnati Enquirer radio/TV guru John Kiesewetter counted up the forced departures at the Kenwood HQ of the company, and came up with…19 people out the door at eight stations.
19!
If you want the gruesome details, and a list of some of the folks we didn’t have, it’s at Kiesewetter’s blog here.
Kiesewetter notes that the number of 19 layoffs does NOT include, believe it or not, Jerry Springer’s producer Stephanie Tyler. The end of her position is tied to that show’s demise, not to the station’s budget cuts.
And we now wonder why any young person even considers a career in this business in 2006…
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