The snow is no longer flying again, for now, but the layoff season is in full swing…
CLEAR CHANNEL SALES CUTS: It’d been foreseen for weeks.
Media giant Clear Channel was expected to radically overhaul its sales structure, cutting back on local sales efforts and streamlining that end of the company’s operations.
Sure enough, that became a reality on Wednesday.
We’ll let the excellent Tom Taylor Now newsletter handle the basic description, quoting from a company release about a topic Clear Channel normally doesn’t talk much about in public:
But this one is significant enough for a vague press release – “for the last several months we have been flattening our senior management organization to reduce overlap. Now we are aligning our sales organizations to this new structure” – that’s the cutting in the local sales bullpen. That’s supposed to “give more resources, authority and accountability to the most productive members of our team, so we can operate as effectively and efficiently as possible.” Clear Channel says “in the process, some people were negatively affected.”
As usual in media layoffs, “effectively and efficiently” means “with less of you”, and negatively affected means “you’re out of a job.” (Though as Tom notes, the company does promise to help displaced employees with the transition to make it as “easy as possible.”)
The Clear Channel sales cuts do appear to affect the entire company, and to that effect, OMW hears that six account executives at Oak Tree, the company’s big Cleveland cluster, are no longer employed.
We haven’t heard yet the numbers out of Freedom Avenue (Akron/Canton) or South Avenue (Youngstown), but we assume they are proportional to the sales force size.
We also hear pesky rumors that Clear Channel won’t be limiting cuts to the sales force, though there’s not even the slightest confirmation of that from our sources…yet.
We note that with Clear Channel and other mega-broadcast chains, particularly those saddled with massive debt (we’re also looking at you, Cumulus!), saying “there will be more layoffs down the road” is roughly akin to saying “another bus comes in 15 minutes”…
THE BUZZARD: There’s been a lot of attention paid this week to “The Buzzard”, and not the bird itself which (according to local legend and TV reporters) descends upon Hinckley each year.
No, it’s radio’s “buzzard”, the famous symbol of what’s now Clear Channel’s current rock/talk WMMS/100.7…which is much more known worldwide for its extensive history as a rock station. The Buzzard logo and iconic nickname celebrate a 40th anniversary this week.
The Plain Dealer/Northeast Ohio Media Group/cleveland.com is running a series of articles under the heading “WMMS: The Buzzard Turns 40”.
Of particular note for our readers is an article tracking down some of the biggest names and what they’re doing today.
Those still on the air in radio include:
* Jeff Kinzbach (“Jeff and Flash”). Jeff’s the morning drive host down I-77, at Rubber City Radio Group rock WONE/97.5 in Akron. He’s paired with news voice and OMW reader Ed Esposito, the cluster’s VP/information media (news director). The station can be heard in many parts of the Cleveland market.
* Ed “Flash” Ferenc (“Jeff and Flash”). The Plain Dealer piece notes his day job as a public information officer for the Cleveland Municipal Court. It doesn’t mention that he’s also on the air daily on Radio One brokered/talk WERE/1490, hosting the “America’s Work Force” show focusing on labor issues. As noted earlier, WERE’s signal is also carried on the HD sidechannels of both urban AC WZAK/93.1 and hip hop WENZ/107.9.
* Ruby Cheeks needs to drive north to Flagstaff AZ to see snow. She’s been in Phoenix for some time, and is now doing middays at Hubbard rock KDKB/93.3 there.
* “Kid Leo” is in the world of satellite radio. He’s the long-time program director of SiriusXM’s “Little Steven’s Underground Garage”, headlined by musician “Little Steven” Van Zandt. Kid Leo also pulls down an airshift on the channel from 4-7 PM Eastern, according to its website.
As you might expect 40-plus years after that famous bird (created and drawn by David Helton) took its radio roost, there are a lot of former broadcasters on the list provided by the Plain Dealer.
There’s a rather diverse list of current jobs, and a note that the one and only Murray Saul (“Get Down!”) is still with us at nearly 86 years young (!).
Sadly, Len “Boom” Goldberg, the distinctive Voice of WMMS, is no longer with us, of course.
We covered his death back in 2006, just a year and a half after we started this thing…
Like those local radio icons who passed before him in recent weeks, WMMS veteran Len “Boom” Goldberg basically defined what happened around him on the radio.
Like Jaybird Drennan, whose voice you instantly hear in your head when you think about long-time Akron country outlet WSLR “Whistler 1350″, “Boom” was the voice of “The Buzzard”.
Off-air, WMMS program director John Gorman is a consultant and an OMW reader, and author of the book “The Buzzard: Inside the Glory Days of WMMS and Cleveland Rock Radio–A Memoir”.
The blog set up for the book hasn’t been updated since 2010…but there’s still a lot of good information and Buzzard-related media there, as well as a still-working link to Amazon.com to buy the book…
HOCKEY ON TV: Professionally, there’s only a minor league hockey team in Northeast Ohio, the AHL’s Lake Erie Monsters (owned by Cavaliers/Gladiators/Quicken Loans Arena’s Dan Gilbert).
There are more hockey fans here, though, than you’d expect in a major city without its own NHL team, and many of them follow the Columbus Blue Jackets down I-71.
The Blue Jackets are in the first round of the NHL playoffs, and game one against the down-I-70 Pittsburgh Penguins prompted a lot more questions than usual regarding TV coverage.
The Blue Jackets’ local TV home is Fox Sports Ohio, and that network did indeed cover Wednesday night’s contest.
But…
Fox Sports Ohio has to move around games when they conflict with other games.
Wednesday, it was the final regular season (and season) game featuring the Cleveland Cavaliers. Up here, the Cavs take the main FS Ohio channel.
In Columbus, Cincinnati and other areas outside Northeast Ohio, the Blue Jackets take the main FS Ohio channel when there’s a conflict.
The local sports network moves the game not being shown on the main channel to a “secondary” channel.
That means on Wednesday night, the Blue Jackets-Penguins game aired on, for example, channel 310 on Time Warner’s Northeast Ohio systems, right next to the main digital channel for Fox Sports Ohio.
It’s a little more complicated if you’re a DirecTV subscriber, as we noted last night on our Twitter feed.
What Fox Sports Ohio called the “alternate” channel for the Blue Jackets game is basically the regular Cincinnati feed, which is noted as “FSCincinnati”, but which is still called Fox Sports Ohio on the air. For example, it’s the feed which carries the Cincinnati Reds, not seen here in Northeast Ohio.
DirecTV viewers told us Wednesday night, and the network itself confirmed via Twitter, that “FSCincinnati” is only available on DirecTV if a subscriber buys the extra “sports pack”.
That’s the pack that brings in a host of regional sports networks (RSNs) across the nation, though there are still blackout issues. (For example, you can’t watch the Reds in Cleveland via “FSCincinnati” even if you pay for the extra cost package.)
Then, those in places like Canton have other issues for this NHL playoff series, due to territorial rights for Root Sports. That’s the Pittsburgh-based RSN which carries the Penguins.
And despite that, cable and satellite providers most assuredly do NOT offer Root Sports in areas west of, say, Youngstown/Warren. Go figure.
Some who couldn’t get the game at all on Fox Sports Ohio found it on NBC Sports Network. NBCUniversal is the national rights holder of the NHL, and one game (not Columbus-Pittsburgh) was even seen on CNBC.
Some of this should clear up by game two of the Blue Jackets-Penguins series on Saturday. With the Cavaliers having wrapped up their season, there’ll be no Northeast Ohio conflict, with the game on the main Fox Sports Ohio channel statewide.
(We’ll check to see if Root Sports causes problems in Eastern Ohio on Saturday.)
On the radio side, Elyria-Lorain Broadcasting talk WEOL/930 Elyria, Clear Channel sports WARF/1350 Akron “Fox Sports 1350” and Spirit Broadcasting talk WINT/1330 Willoughby “Integrity Radio” are the NHL team’s Northeast Ohio broadcast outlets, though we don’t know how many games in this series will be heard on local radio here.
Meanwhile, anyone who says Northeast Ohio has few hockey fans should contact us, or Scripps ABC affiliate WEWS/5 “NewsChannel 5” sports director/CBS Radio sports WKRK/92.3 “The Fan” middayer Andy Baskin.
Poor Andy was getting deluged by folks trying to find the Blue Jackets game on TV, and neither of his broadcast outlets even carry any NHL games…
GLENN AT RESERVE SQUARE: A mention on Clear Channel talk WTAM/1100 afternoon driver Mike Trivisonno’s show got people asking: what is producer Glenn Forbes doing on WOIO/19 on Wednesday night?
Glenn responded to OMW on Twitter:
Just on the news desk, trying to learn the medium. That’s my focus for now, could be more down the line.
If there is indeed “more down the line” for Glenn, he’d follow a now-former WTAM staffer into Reserve Square: “19 Action News” sports anchor/reporter Mark Schwab.
We remind readers that before joining the Triv Show, Forbes worked in the WTAM newsroom…and also worked for the company’s Toledo news operation before losing his job in one of those Clear Channel layoff binges we talked about earlier in this item…
SPEAKING OF LAYOFFS, AGAIN: We missed this item a week ago in Akron Beacon Journal pop culture writer Rich Heldenfels’ “HeldenFiles” blog on Ohio.com. (We’re no fans of the website’s redesign, for one.)
Radio shakeup. WKSU (89.7-FM) has let go reporting/producing veteran Mark Urycki and folk-music man Matt Watroba, who had been on staff for three years.
Watroba moved to Ohio and WKSU from Detroit’s WDET/101.9 in 2011 to work for WKSU and its FolkAlley.com website/stream/digital channel.
Heldenfels notes the ongoing changes at the Kent-based public broadcaster, notably its move towards news/public affairs and away from music.
But he’s scratching his head at the exit of newsman Urycki, a veteran newsman who came back to the station in 2007 in a brief stint as program director. He’s been a news reporter for the station in recent times.
We don’t know if the moves are related at all…
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