It’s been a bad year so far for old-school radio.
After iHeart Media and Audacy completed their round of budget-induced layoffs, Atlanta-based Cumulus Media initiated theirs.
But their cuts hit listeners hardest where it hurt most: their personal connection to their favorite radio stations, the live DJ.
The barrage of Cumulus cuts was startling to listeners who tuned in to hear their usual slate of banter mixed with hit music. So were the personalities themselves.
WWWQ’s longtime host Kristin Klingshirn, a former member of The Bert Show, was an early casualty. She was as surprised as listeners to find out hours before she was to take the mic on her six-month-old show that she was out of a job.
“I was let go from Cumulus Media today,” Klingshirn posted on Instagram. “I’ll have more to say later. Right now, I’m gonna process and discuss plans with my husband. And then I’m gonna pick up my son from school. Because I can now.” Co-host Ethan Cole is now the sole person on their 2-7 pm weekday time slot.
The cuts at CHR Q99.7 were unsparing of those in front of the mic as well. The station’s assistant program director and night host Laura Dickerson served those roles at both Q99.7 and Cumulus’ co-owned Houston CHR KRBE. She’s no longer on either station.
“As difficult as this has been personally, my heart is also with my radio brothers and sisters who are also going through this right now all over the country,” Dickerson posted on Instagram.
Jake Bennet, the promotions director over Cumulus’ Atlanta stations, also lost his job.
But the mass dismissal of on-air staff at WWWQ’s sister station, the classic alternative-formatted WNNX (“99X”), stunned the radio world unlike any of the other layoffs this year. This year, the station, revived two years ago in the tradition of its years as a groundbreaking alternative radio station in the 90’s, 99X garnered steady ratings. But it wasn’t enough to keep Cumulus from dismissing Steve Barnes, Leslie Framm (in an earlier shocking dismissal), Chris “Crash’ Clark, Leslie “LT’ Tillery, Steve Craig (the station’s program director), Jill Nelson, and Matt “Organic” Jones. Only afternoon host Will Pendarvis is still with the station.
The last two weeks at Cumulus were a national drumbeat of layoffs of industry veterans and those with less tenure at their stations. One of Cumulus’ stations in Kansas City saw its whole staff wiped out, and the station changed formats the next day.
The cause of these layoffs stems from an ongoing problem radio broadcasters created for themselves decades ago. A change in laws created a means for stations to bulk up, but in the quest for scale and advertising revenue dominance, radio lost what made it special in the ears of its listeners.
When the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed, it opened the door to station groups like Clear Channel (now iHeart Media), Infinity (now Audacy), and Cumulus to purchase as many stations as they could write a check for. At one point, Clear Channel owned more than a thousand radio stations. Cumulus was created to be a middle/small market station owner, contrasting with the more big-city-oriented Clear Channel and Infinity.
As it began competing with Clear Channel and others for stations, it obtained financing to pay for those acquisitions. As it was growing in the 2000’s, advertising money, the lifeblood of radio, started to slow. But that didn’t stop Cumulus from buying more stations and tacking on debt.
In 2006, Cumulus made its biggest and most transformative acquisition yet. It bought Pennsylvania-based Susquehanna Radio for $1.2 billion. That acquisition added big-city radio stations to its mostly middle and small market station roster. Two of those stations were Atlanta’s WNNX and WWWQ.
Cumulus’s fortunes continued sliding, with its stock price going from $56 in 1999 to $22 in 2004. But Cumulus kept buying, acquiring Citadel Broadcasting, putting it in markets like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Then it bought national radio syndication company Dial Global (now Westwood One) in 2013.
In 2016, the first signs of real financial trouble struck Cumulus. Its treasurer and CFO, Joseph Hannan, left the company. A year later, Cumulus would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It would then sell some of its most popular stations, WPLJ in New York (a longtime CHR in the number one US market) and several other stations, including Atlanta’s WYAY 106.7 FM, which was a country, oldies, and later a news and talk station, to religious broadcaster Educational Media Foundation for $103.5 million. It would later swap out the co-located NYC station WNSH and sell talker WABC, completely divesting itself from the very lucrative NYC market.
Mary K. Berner, Cumulus’ President and CEO, who was hired in 2015 and had a mostly print media background and no obvious radio experience, said of the transaction that the sale was to generate “substantial cash for debt repayment and investment in other business opportunities.” That deal also included WRQX Washington DC, KFFG San Jose, CA, and WZAT, Savannah Ga. All legendary, high-value stations in top markets that now broadcast EMF’s popular Christian Contempary format, K-Love, with all of the content originating from a central location in Franklin, Tennessee, EMF’s home base. The stations, once having jocks and a back office staff of salespeople, program and music managers, and others, now are basically a board, transmitter, and satellite dish. Jobs in front of and behind the microphone were lost.
It wasn’t lost on EMF brass what they were getting for their money. The company got popular, legendary stations for less than what they would have paid years ago, when radio fortunes were better. “We are thrilled to add these stations to the K-LOVE network and for the opportunity to continue to bring people closer to Jesus,” said Alan Mason, EMF’s then President and CEO. “These are legendary stations that will enable us to enter new markets in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Savannah, and Syracuse and expand our footprint in New York.” EMF, now known as K-Love Inc., is a non-commercial entity that makes money through listener donations, not reliant on advertiser dollars.
K-Love now also owns Salem’s former FM Atlanta CCH station WFSH, “104.7 The Fish,” after years of competition. It’s now WAIA and broadcasts EMF’s other national brand, Air 1.
The K-Love deal did little to reverse Cumulus’ financial issues, and it certainly didn’t help facilitate more “business opportunities”. Earlier this year, Cumulus once again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the second filing in a decade. Assets and liabilities were listed between $1 and $10 billion. In April, the company got court-approved permission to go private and reduce its debt load by nearly $600 billion. It has also been tangling with radio ratings tabulator Nielsen, saying that the company was “leveraging its dominance over national and local radio audience data to charge inflated prices and force radio companies to buy data they did not need or want.” Ratings information has not been listed on Cumulus stations since February, which observers say is hampering its ability to attract advertising and work with record labels, among other issues. Cumulus’ restructuring plan is scheduled to be finalized later this year, but what the new Cumulus will look like is unknown. In addition to pink-slipping staff members, it continues to sell and even shut down stations.
Life goes on, and apparently, so does radio.
As of this writing, Klingshirin and Dickerson have been removed from Q99.7’s website. 99X is still playing classic alternative music, but is currently jockless, with no Morning X, no House of Retro Pleasure, Planet Jill, Organic X, Resurrection Sunday, Live X, or any other programming that differentiated the station and its legacy. That could, sadly, be the future of greater broadcast radio. Especially since it’s princials apparently haven’t learned their lesson from previous mistakes.
Radio trade site RadioWorld reported June 15th that Berner and several other radio group CEOs went to the FCC to call for deleting local radio ownership caps, enabling them to buy more stations. Berner (who likely will be retained as Cumulus CEO after the restructuring is completed next year) reportedly told FCC Chairman Brendan Carr “that significant relaxation of the radio ownership rules would be required for companies in the industry to invest in the future of radio and preserve localism.”
Caroline Beasley, CEO of Beasley Media, told Carr that radio broadcasters can’t invest in producing content and information because of those pesky caps.
“Continuing to starve the radio industry of the capital and scale it needs to survive will not serve the public interest,” Beasley is quoted as telling the chair by RadioWorld.
The radio industry still swears by the more than 30-year-old notion that if they could buy all the stations they can, the companies could invest in content and do a better job disseminating news and information. But with many of these stations, 30 years since the signing into law of the Telecom Act, now automated, with others facing being jockless, sold, or even shut down, can their new “let us eat cake or radio will suffer” claims be believed now?
The radio industry had no problem bulking up and cranking out content with the caps in place, in some cases to their detriment. Asking for the federal blessing to buy more stations at a time when these same companies are laying off staff and running stations out of a laptop while sitting in bankruptcy court is a head-scratcher. And a station with a silent mic and an empty DJ chair doesn’t serve the public interest either.
Radio is certainly struggling these days, with most of the industry hemorrhaging cash.
Radio Revenue Declines (Second Quarter 2026)
| Salem Media | -15% |
| Cumulus Media | -9.75 |
| Beasley Media Group | -9.6% |
| Saga Communications | -6.5% |
| Urban One | -6.4% |
| iHeart Media | +4.7 (-2% b’cast sector; gains came from digital, 12%, and podcast, 21%) |
| Townsquare Media | -0.1% |
Note: Audacy is a private company and does not file a quarterly financial report. Data sources from the respective companies.
As you can see, every radio group listed shows a decline in revenues in the second quarter this year. iHeart and Townsquare showed gains or slight decreases because their stronger performance in digital media and podcasts offset declines in traditional broadcasting. Station groups without a digital/podcast strategy are struggling.
Terrestrial radio’s self-inflicted pain is coming at a time when its future has never been more in question. Streaming media is booming, draining listeners and advertising cash from terrestrial radio. Teens have long since abandoned terrestrial radio for YouTube and Spotify. SiriusXM, the satellite radio subscription company observers once ridiculed for the concept of folks paying for radio when they could get it for free, continues to gain subscribers to a level that even broadcasters want to work with the company. The medium is in fierce competition with other platforms for news and sports coverage. Then add the back-to-back greater financial struggles inflicting the whole economy, sapping advertiser dollars from an industry struggling to monetize its own content the way the tech economy is doing.
It doesn’t help the industry’s cause with their own duplicity when dealing with its issues. They are currently fighting with the auto industry to keep AM radio frequencies in automobiles, as some auto companies are dropping support for the frequency in newer cars. The strategy would make sense if some broadcasters didn’t shut down their own AM stations due to low ratings.
Cumulus’ issues are a reflection of the greater radio industry, which, like the rest of the media world, has maintained an obsession with “scale”, ignoring the reality that size can’t replace quality. What makes broadcast radio special is the human element, the jock who introduces the song. The traffic reporter who finds different ways to warn of an overturned big rig on I-75 for the fourth day in a row. The back-and-forth banter between songs. To radio listeners, these things matter. They notice when these things disappear and wander off to competing stimuli from other sources.
And if the heads of these station groups continue to lose sight of this, listeners will continue to drift away, taking ratings and resulting ad dollars with them, and broadcasters’ financial problems will continue. No matter how big they continue to get.
An opinion, by Brian Allen, Editor and Owner of From the 404.
