In case you hadn't heard, CBS is following CC's and Emmis' lead and cutting 5% of its staff. NYC and Chicago seem to be particularly hard hit. Anyone hear if there were any local positions cut?

Stacey Lynn, Rebecca Webb and Dave McKay were all let go at CBS today... and at least one person on the "office" staff..

Very sad to see Radio get gutted over the last several years.. the good news is all of the CBS CEO's retained there multi-million dollar salaries..

It's time just like this that makes me glad that I left radio and never looked back.

what happens to movin now? only one jock? wow.

CHARLIE clone....

Format flip.....

Rebecca Webb? A top morning person for billions of years? Doubt they will drop morning news.....so now what....

Getting very scary in this biz.....Saw some of the other CBS layoffs.....also many long time excellent people....(all probably making too much money now.....)

Man, I think its time to buy stock in Apple. Ipod sales are gonna keep going up.

> It's time just like this that makes me glad that I
> left radio and never looked back.

But, is there any industry where people don't get cut in rounds of layoffs? I see this as unavoidable as death and taxes.

Its really a sad thing. Just to think how I(we)everybody 'heard the hits' growing up courtesy of all the owners who made plenty of money and had the resources to hire a lot of great talent on and off the air selling and presenting the hits to us kids and young adults, and to the older ones too. The cash was there, the medium was there. The identification and pride 'your station' , your favorite DJ or 'show'. Also pride in the surrounding community. It was a signature business, the whole ambience of it all, the fun with jingle packages/images and promotions,the Call Signs, the Frequency numbers as identifiers all of it together,it all mattered. It is all quickly going away now. Chunk by chip.

For us that got to be 'in the biz' to one degree or another and getting a charge out of the effect it had on the listeners and on our own lives and in a few cases positive outcomes to the benefit of our checking accounts, is simply going to be a faded memory .

Hail to all of you that are still 'there'. You have more nerve than many of the rest of us that 'arent' anymore.

And that is just what we need is another Charlie ANYWHERE. We have a 'BOB' over here and that station got a whopping 2.3 12+. For this barely medium sized market that is a disgrace especially when they started out 2.5 years ago with numbers around a 4.

I don't know that I would necessarily call it nerve. I would think that many really like what they are doing and the industry and, as luck would have it, they are hanging in there as long as they can.

Wasn't Stacey Lynn leaving to join the Charlie morning show anyway?

"Stacey Lynn going to Charlie" was mere speculation.

... I could swear I read it here how glad they were to get Stacey in the first place......

Wonder if they considered a five percent pay cut from top to bottom before gutting some stations.

Somehow, I don't see these cuts improving the quality of their stations. Guess quality isn't really a part of the agenda. Anyone see a ratings spike coming after this? Maybe they ought to turn a few off and turn in the licenses.

Emphasis ought to be on growing revenue on a station by station basis rather than trying to maintain unsustainable margins.....

Sad, sad, sad...............

Seems like they are afraid to let go of anything in fear that someone else will pick it up and actually do good with it. It's sad to hear about good air-talent getting cut, good luck to them in whatever they do next.

Do you think that once radio hits bottom that it can bounce back under independent ownership in smaller clusters?

More like they'll be requesting permission for even bigger clusters.

If you read the entire story in R&R, you'll see that the cuts were across the board. GMs, LSMs, GSMs, marketing, new media, as well as personalities. It appears that each market was given a "personnel salaries budget cut" number, and each market made cuts as they saw fit.

The pernicious cycle :

cut talent to save money, save money in the short run, to reduce quality in the long run, to marginalize the product, to make even less money, so we can find places to save more money by cutting more staff, so we can reduce the quality even more, so we can have a product that is almost worthless......

Will someone play taps please

I see KHITS has adjusted the air staff times.....but Rebecca Webb can still be found one place on the KINK site....

How soon does Movin go Spanish?

Jack!

They could go "Spanish Jack", then Dark.

1075 should go Rock from the 60's. 70's, 80's, 90's and Today. They can be a "jack" type station except only focus on the ROCK MUSIC!

"Do you think that once radio hits bottom that it can bounce back under independent ownership in smaller clusters?"

I realize I'm in a minority when I say this...but I hope the above doesn't come to pass - at least when it comes to independent, local ownership.

While I am very cognizant of the problems consolidation and corporate ownership have caused, from my personal experience local ownership isn't much better...but for different reasons.

Crippling nepotism, corruption, sexism, and micromanagement were a constant problem "back in the good ole days" of local ownership. I'm not saying these problems don't exist with corporate ownership, but I've never found them to the degree I did when the owner of the station(s) was running around the building regularly, hitting on salespeople, buying blow from the PD, and demanding that you not play songs from hip-hop artists on a CHR 'cause his wife doesn't like "black" music.

Amen radiodawgz. Yes, consolidation has created problems, but I think it has fixed far more. If I had my choice between mom and pop or corporate, I'll work for the big company.

I'm all for local businesses, but it seems like local radio owners tend to be bad business people. I don't miss the days of going to the bank only to find out my paycheck bounced. At one station the owners wife would call and make requests for country songs (we were a rock station), and if we didn't play them there would be Hell to pay. We actually had a box of her favorite records in the studio.

I've worked for six independent stations and only had one positive experience - when we were bought by a group and we all got health insurance.

Sorry, but when I listen to the radio now I don't notice many things that I'd call better. Not to mention the treatment of the employees, who are now very much like retail employees. The industry appears to be gutted. The emperor has no clothes.

Yes,

What are the lesser of the 'eight' different evils. The owner's wife or the board of directors. The 'sound of the station' or the ease of automation and multitasking with very few people. Getting paid and waiting for your check to clear a week late or being the subject of a budget cut or keeping your position and moving up with the same station/company over a 10 year period. ....We report , you decide.....

Yeah, I've worked for some pretty scary mom-and-pops. I had to steal my boss's wife's car once. But that's why you don't want to get stuck in the minors. At that stage of a career, experiences with amateurish owners give you all the more reason to move up to bigger and better-managed operations.

And some still are. But it's getting harder and harder. Personally I'm blown away to see KINK let Rebecca Webb get away. Sounds like a decision was made by somebody who doesn't know this market very well.

....Sounds like a decision was made by somebody who doesn't know this market very well.

In some cases, that is EXACTLY the problem.

Quick question for everyone. How many times have you got done with your air shift and the PD is right there telling you that's your last show and your out of here?

Or you see the promotion team come back and right after they clean up the station van, they have to turn in their keys?

Or you take your vacation and when you come back the key to the back door has been changed. And when you go to the front doors a sales person is there saying that a e-mail went out last Friday saying that you were fired.

Some of that has happened to me and I'm sure that some of that has happened to some of you. I just got really tired of seeing managment firing people like they were snipers in a jungle out for a kill.

In the real world they just fire you, and I can live with that. Only in radio would managment smile as you come in the door. Talk to you to see how you and your family are doing. Send you off to do your job, Then pull you in after your done and fire you.

Have you ever been told a day after Christmas that you dont have a voice tracking assignment anymore. And so you say, OK am I fired and they say " No you arent fired" go talk to so and so down the hall and see if they want you to VT on their station. The other PD/OM just shines you on about something off in the future. So you keep your front door key and piddle around going in every 3 weeks an finally meet some new OPS mgr who just stands there with his blow up front yard superman action figure in his office for local color and tells you he 'wants' to put you on the air but 'cant' right now. So you just turn in your key and get asked by the HR person , now does this mean you quit...I have never been treated like that before, anywhere.

It might have had something to do with the fact that I was 56 years old had worked there for 12 years, partime of course, and they didnt want some kind of age discrimination suit filed. Pretty friggin' whimpy I would say.

Kennewickman, you hit the head right on the nail.

I happen to prefer the mom and pop ownership. Always have. Always been small time though, never played with the big boys.
I won't put up with their crap.
I hear the stories, I see the results and better yet I hear the stations, they suck and the airstaff, if there is one, are hamstrung puppets spitting out whatever the corporate image is.
I am so sick of "the new KXXX". How friggin long are you NEW!!
Sheesh.
Anyway I have only had one bad single owner problem and there are many on this board that got screwed by that guy too, so no need to mention him.
The single operator has always been fair to me and try to make me the "Star". I appreciate that and I work my butt off to make them more money and they reciprocate.
So, I will probably never be in the "bigs". Eh, who needs em?
Whattya gonna do eh?

Re: KINK- so can someone who listened tell us - who did morning news on Friday?? Wondered is Sheila Hamilton will move up to mornings?

Smaller operations back in the day had their quirks and eccentricities to be sure, but in two decades in radio, I never lost a job until I was laid off by a big corporation. These people treated me great while I was doing my part to make my stations more profitable. But because I was in programming (OPS MGR), for two years my job was a line item potentially to be cut from the budget. As I later learned, it was by the sheer force of will of two GMs that kept my job intact, despite pressure from above to make further cuts. These GMs apparently saw my value. When the third GM in two years wanted to add something to the budget, and the corp. wouldn't spring for it, this gentleman had no trouble getting what he wanted by heaving my carcass overboard.

Even so, during those two years, the corp. treated me fairly and with respect. Although I felt woefully underpaid vis-à-vis my contribution, I did see some firsts, like overtime pay and a budget, both of which I never saw under independent ownership.

Overtime pay is something that is now a federal law relative even to salaried employees, it has been for some time, but the real bottom line is that ugly word, lawsuits. Very many being won by the plaintifs. Ergo, many corporates just rolled over and implemented a program for addressing overtime, poof, we are being the nice guys now. I have heard this same story about a number of other broadcast ownerships , it really started around Y2k.

Its a lot about lawyers and lawsuits and who wins and loses. What is the trend in court decisions.

There are some quite interesting posts about KINK morning show host Rebecca Webb's leaving KINK as part of the CBS cuts over at OMI

<http://oregonmediainsiders.com/node/1470>

I think KINK just made, as they say in broadcasting, "an error!"

CBS's Moonves Receives 29% Pay Raise
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120795962366509487.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Here's a link to the full article-
"CBS's Moonves Receives 29% Pay Raise"

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=CBS%27s+Moonves+Receives+29%25+Pay+Ra ise&btnG=Search+News

Its too bad Stacey Lynn and Rebecca got the cut, both great talents that will find work soon. I think Kink in general has been going down the hill for a while. Getting rid of Inessa in the mid-days was one of the dumbest decisions ever. By far one of the best talents on that station. Stacey Lynn just flat out ROCKS! I hope to hear her on Portland radio again really soon.

Les Moonves
CBS CORP. CEO LESLIE MOONVES got a 29% bump in his compensation in 2007, reaping a package valued at $36.8 million, according to a proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, writes THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. The compensation package, ranking among the biggest in the media industry, was awarded in a year in which CBS' stock fell about 13% and its net income tumbled 25%. While the company generated significant cash last year, its core TV and radio businesses stumbled.

Shares in CBS, which has a market value of about $15 billion, have steadily declined from a high of $35.75 last JULY, falling about 20% so far this year. The stock was just off its 52-week low at $21.40 in 4p composite trading on the NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE FRIDAY.

Asked to comment on the compensation, a CBS spokesman said in a statement: "A significant portion of his reported compensation in 2007 is related to stock that was given to him in past years and was required to be reported this year, as well as some overlapping reporting of stock-based compensation from his old deal and new deal."

As part of a new employment contract, MOONVES receives a lower base salary and more equity-based compensation. However, that didn't kick in until OCTOBER of last year.
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thats the reward for turning local radio into a ipods with commercials

Is Movin ever going to get live jocks, OR are they just waiting to blow the station up? That station is so lifeless, I don't see how they are going to keep people listening to that station.

Imagine how much live, local, original programming could be produced for even a fraction of that 36.8 million.

Nauseating.

all you can do is imagine...........