Wednesday, April 29, 2009

More on the CC Restructuring

Here's what we know about Clear Channel's restructuring, and how it affects local operations.

Again, as pointed out, Alan Cutler, C. Trent Rosencrans, and Paul Daugherty are out. At 700WLW, Lance McAlister is in at 6pm, staying until 9 when the Reds do not play a night game, and staying until pregame when they are.

At 1530 WCKY, Mo Eggers will fill in for McAlister when the Reds do not play a night game in the 3-6pm slot. Fox Sports Radio otherwise fills out the schedule.

We now, however, have a new piece of information courtesy our friends at OMW (that's Ohio Media Watch for the new readers).

CC is going to take their local news operations and consolidate into a "hub and spoke" system.

We copied and pasted this from OMW's latest item, but this is who Cincinnati's CC Newsroom will serve in the new system:

Boston
Toledo
Memphis
Nashville

You are reading correctly. Boston will no longer have its own live, local anchors delivering news updates.

For perspective, Boston is Arbitron's TENTH largest market. Cincinnati is market number 28. Memphis is number 49, Nashville a few spots above them at number 44. Toledo is number 91. These are rankings by size.

If the tenth largest market by size was ordered to basically lay off their entire news anchor staff, that's very significant! Boston likely still has a newsroom (after all, it doesn't make sense to call Cincinnati, if you're a Bostonian wanting to relay a breaking story, does it?)...but no longer are there or will there be live, local news anchors on the Boston stations.

3 comments:

Cliff said...

In a strange way, this does make sense. You see the very first professional baseball team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869. Harry Wright, two years later took some of the players, went to Boston and then formed the Boston Red Stockings, later to become the Braves.

Does this make sense to you? Neither does anything Clear Channel's been doing making any sense to me.

Ohio Media Watch said...

As I pointed out on my end, CC/Boston has basically no news department.

Their AMs do a Spanish-language simulcast (and I'm pretty sure won't be looking for Spanish-language news from Cincinnati!), and the rest of the cluster is music FMs with very little need for news and information.

It still makes me chuckle, though.

-OMW

Anonymous said...

The only radio newsroom I know of in Boston would be at... WBZ-AM. The Entercom stations have no news presence, even (severly) faded talk WRKO. (That was gutted when Entercom renewed the Red Sox PBP rights.) I also doubt Greater Media's WTKK-FM has a news department, either.

I am curious as to what stations KFI in LA will feed off to.