American Radio Giant IHeartMedia lays off more Radio workers in latest round

In Radio, there's an old adage that 'everyone gets fired sooner or later'. 

For years it was a running joke at radio. I used to hear 'I was fired' stories a lot during my 20 year stint in the industry.

When I lost my first radio job -- I was an intern at a local classic rocker in October-December of 1987 -- the Program Director said "Hey, don't worry. Radio people won't think you're bad news because you got fired. I got fired from my first radio job, too!"

It just happens in Radio. 

Lately, it's been happening more and more.

The problem is that with the financial woes hitting my former career field lately, layoffs and 'Reductions-in-Force' are getting more and more frequent. And this time it's apparently hitting a lot of middle management and sales people -- including some programmers -- at American radio media giant IHeart.

IHeartMedia has announced a series of layoffs that hit various operations all over the US. Even a programmer in Seattle (at Sports radio station KJR-FM) is being laid off.

Here's a couple articles from online media newspaper Barrett Media.:

https://barrettmedia.com/2026/04/08/iheartmedia-begins-round-of-layoffs-affecting-management-sales-staffs/

https://barrettmedia.com/2026/04/15/marc-james-departs-kjr-as-iheartmedia-continues-ongoing-layoffs/

Other people at IHeart stations are being let go, including some air talent. It's like February 2020 all over again -- seeing social media posts by morning DJ's and the like who are saying good bye to their loyal and faithful listeners.

Here's a news story about a veteran morning host in Connecticut who's being let go.:

https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/allison-demers-layoff-ct-radio-whcn-22208013.php

It's all very sad, really. The vast majority of those laid off will never work in Radio again.

A lot of us who used to work in the industry look at this debacle with a mixture of sarcasm and chagrin. Many of us -- who no longer work in Radio -- know exactly how it feels to be laid off, and never work in Radio again. Every guy I was laid off with -- all seven of us, when they eliminated our entire department in December of 2006 -- never worked in Radio again. 

That's the chagrin part.

The sarcasm part? That's when you read of yet another round of layoffs at a radio company and you wonder if there is anybody left at that company to lay off.

IHeartMedia has a mixed reputation in Radio. Many credit the company for trying to move their operations online, where the future seems to lie. The IHeartRadio online platform has been a success. 

But many Radio fans also dislike the company for the consolidation, homogenization, and sometimes heartless appearing actions, like when the company got rid of 10% of its radio staff in early 2020 -- including many DJ's and airstaff who loved their jobs, and found themselves laid off, with little chance of working in Radio ever again.

Some of the social media posts by laid off DJ's were heartrending. They were working at a dream job, relating to people, connecting with their communities, and -- as far as many of them knew -- they were still getting ratings.

Then the axe came down.

To many who used to work in Radio, these rounds of layoffs that seem to occur every year -- not just at IHeart, but at the other big American Radio companies too -- are just another indicator of the downward slide that the industry is taking. 

Less people on the airwaves, more automation, less local content, and the medium seems less and less personable.

Although the Radio industry is hitting some hard times, there still are a lot of cool and diverse radio stations on the night time airwaves. KBBR 1340, out of North Bend, Oregon is one of them. KBBR plays an interesting mix of oldies and classic hits. North Band, and its sister city, Coos Bay, are on the Southern Oregon Coast, where the weather is in the mid 60's F year around.

IHeart has famously adopted an anti-AI stance, with commercial announcements and some PR releases announcing that the company is anti-AI, and that the voices and songs you hear on their stations are 100 percent human.

Now the jokes about this latest round of layoffs is 'where are the humans? They're all being laid off!' and the like.

However, there is a revenue problem that is behind a lot of these layoffs.

One other large American radio company, Cumulus, is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. During the proceedings, Cumulus reported that its broadcast radio revenues declined 15.9% in 2025. Network revenue (including WestwoodOne) was down 22.5%; Advertising revenue from Radio was down 12.9%. The company as a whole lost $200 Million last year.

Here's a report on Cumulus's revenue declines from RadioInk.:

https://radioink.com/2026/04/10/cumulus-reports-200m-loss-for-2025-as-chapter-11-continues/

The drops in broadcast radio, spot advertising, and network revenues are indicators that Radio's revenues, industry wide, aren't in terrific shape. Many who work in the business side of Radio believe that what Cumulus is facing isn't a rarity. After all, CBS Radio News is being eliminated because of revenue losses.

Online there are plenty of folks who claim that these nosedives in revenue are because Radio isn't 'live and local' anymore, or because the music stations have short playlists, or because big Radio companies like IHeart 'ruined radio'.

The fact is the internet has damaged radio. There is no getting around that. I have no idea what Radio is going to sound like in 2036, but my guess is that there will be even less human voices on the airwaves, more syndication and consolidation, and less AM and less FM stations on the airwaves. 

In fact, the number of Radio stations in the US continues to decline. RadioInk reports that even FM is in decline -- in the past four months 19 commercial FM stations in the US shut down (there were 32 AM stations shut down during the same three month period).

https://radioink.com/2026/04/10/radio-loses-ground-in-q1-2026-as-license-decline-continues/

These station shutdowns and the recent layoffs are just more symptoms of the issues the Radio industry is facing. And Radio is not alone in this. Newspapers, Magazines, Broadcast and Cable TV -- all these media that used to be taken for granted as important and vital media are starting to feel the pinch.

The world is changing, folks. It's all internet content.

The Internet is killing Radio.

I'll end this with the most positive note I can: If you're a Radio fan, keep tuning those radios, and enjoy the fact that there are still stations on the night time airwaves to listen to.

Quit bitching and griping about the fact that it's not 'live and local', or that the stations don't play every one of your favorite songs. The industry is having money problems, and the listeners and advertisers have increasingly drifted online. TikTok, Instagram, X, Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, et. al. are the new "radio". 

Online podcasts are the new 'talk radio', just as streaming is the new 'music radio'.

It's just the reality. 

Right now I'm going to return to my fiction writing, and listen to my GE Superadio 1, which sits near my writing desk in my den, and it is playing a bunch of stations on 1400 kHz. It's a wild mix of sports, Classic Hits, and a bunch of other stations all mixed in.

Until next time, my friends,

Peace.

C.C. -- April 16th, 2026.

Back to the World

A pic of my little pal Squeakers from 2018? I'm not sure. She was telling me that my guitar amp was now her chair. I still miss that cat.

Just a note to say hello again. I am not sure how long this new, cell system-based internet connection will hold up. Understandably, I do not trust tech companies. But so far it seems to work. It's a wireless internet company, and the modem is a fancy one.

Right now I'm also having to clear a lot of files off my computer, to make space for the endless, resource hogging updates, which seem to increase if you have faster internet.

Isn't tech fun?

I just noticed that my last blog post had no title. Which is weird, because the first thing I did while writing it was typing in a title up at the top of the page. The title obviously did not save. That is how undependable my internet connection was. I have since corrected it. It has a title now.

Nothing else is going on here. My Fuji Camera -- the one that fixed itself -- broke again. I put new batteries in it -- brand new, fresh AA's -- and it turned on and then froze. Once again, I have a Fuji camera that won't take pictures and is frozen with the lens extended, immobile. It's too bad, because it took great pictures. My trusty Nikon L32 still works. I just put a new SD card in it, so I hope to take some pics again soon.

The weather is slowly getting warmer. The trees still have not greened out fully on the hills. Usually they're green by April 5th, but the last few years -- as I've said on this blog several times now -- the trees have been late. Of course, being an SWL and MW radio DXer,  I'm intrigued by the possibility of a possible effect of the Solar Cycles on plant growth. I found an article a few years ago that suggested that Solar Cycles influence plant growth -- it was a university study from the 1970's, that showed a correlation between Solar Maximums and higher crop yields. A recent search on UV and plant growth brings up a few, hard to read articles that are somewhat inconclusive. Here is one of them.:

Editorial: Ultraviolet Radiation: Friend or Foe for Plants? - PMC

If UV affects plant growth, then perhaps the Sun's gradually and slightly diminishing UV output (UVA and UVB -- UVC, which is eUV, is absorbed by the ionosphere) may be part of the reason the trees have been late since 2017. Or it could also be something else that is completely unrelated to Solar activity. Correlation (late trees / Solar eUV diminishing) does not always equal causation.

Either way, I just hope that before the ionosphere dives to the bottom on us, there are a few more months of good conditions for SWL's and Long Distance MW listeners and DXers.

I have plans to put up a longer, outdoor antenna this Spring or Summer. It's just a matter of deciding where to put the wire, as I have plenty of wire. It will be temporary, but hopefully it will help as the Solar Minimum increases. I have good radios. Just need a bigger antenna to make up for what the Ionosphere isn't giving me. :-)

I'm closing this with a video, by the Australian, 70's glam rock band Hush. Hush were very popular in the mid-1970's Oz glam rock scene. I first heard them on Radio Australia, on 5995 kHz, around 2 a.m. in the morning my time. Radio Australia's Countdown program, hosted by Glynnis Dixon, played all the Oz bands from that scene -- AC/DC, Hush, Supernaut, Skyhooks, Sherbet, Dragon, Ted Mulry's Gang, the Angels, Redhouse, Pussyfoot, Air Supply, and a few others I've forgotten.

It was a great period for rock music. The ABC TV show Countdown sort of caused the entire Oz scene to explode, and Radio Australia's own Countdown show was an offshoot of that. Radio Australia's Countdown show had a lot of listeners in India and South Asia, as they'd write letters to Glynnis Dixon, asking her questions and making requests.

It was really fun listening, all on my transistor multiband AM-FM-SW radio and 60 feet (20 meters) of wire going from my bedroom window to the back fence.

Until next time, 

Peace.

C.C. -- April 12th, 2026.

 

STILL ALIVE AND WELL.... AGAIN

This is just a note to say hello again and I'm doing OK. I haven't posted anything in the past week or more for a couple reasons.

The first reason is the most important one. My internet and DSL connection has been spotty lately. I've had about 80 to 100 cut-offs over the past three weeks, where the DSL cuts off (and the internet along with it), and this is after I've had at least 7 tech visits -- to my house, the pedestal outside, and even the main pedestal in the middle of the neighborhood -- over the past 2-3 years.

The techs will sometimes try to install a new connector in my house's junction box, and claim it will solve the problems, because it has 'filters' in it. It doesn't fix anything. The company's AI bot / customer service reps will try to troubleshoot the line from their end -- it never fixes anything. Even a new drop line from the pole and pedestal outside to my house didn't improve anything for longer than a month.

The issue seems to be the phone company's infrastructure is decaying, and they aren't doing enough to keep it in good repair. The fact that much of their wiring is underground, and impossible to service, probably doesn't help. But I have friends who have cable and their internet connection also cuts off from time to time. Not as much as what I'm seeing, though.

I suppose 5G wireless is the only way to go?

Meanwhile, the pricing for my internet services has gone up by over 50 percent in the past 10 years, while the services I pay for have nosedived. I started getting outages right after the Pandemic hit, and it only got worse after that. I have written about this in blog articles before -- it's just that over the past month it's to the point that it's almost impossible to use the internet for longer than 15 minutes to an hour without it cutting off again.

So I'm going to be changing internet service providers over the next couple of weeks. I don't really have any faith in internet providers, being that my experience with internet companies has been so abysmal. But we'll see.

But when you have internet cut-offs and slowdowns, it doesn't make it easy to publish a blog, shop online, or do other things that have become necessary for modern day living.

NUCLEAR WINTER SHORTWAVE RADIO CONDITIONS

Otherwise, life has been fairly normal. The ionosphere appears to have entered Solar Minimum mode, being that the SW bands have been mostly dead here where I live. I know that in the Eastern section of the US and Canada there still is some SW activity, but here in the NW and regions north of 47 Degrees latitude it's already Solar Minimum. 

This morning when I tuned every SWBC and HF ham radio band they were all dead, dead, dead, except for two weak conversations on 17 Meters and a couple SW stations that were barely readable in the 31 and 21 Meter band (Marti, Radyo Pilipinas, North Korea, and CNR-1). 40, 20, 41, 25, 19, 15, 12 and 10 Meters were all dead.

That's the shakes, though. I am going to rig up a longer antenna, and I will run it outdoors, and see if that helps. My indoor antenna worked great during the early 2010's, and it was working well during the 'Peak' SW conditions in Summer and Fall of 2024, when I was hearing bicycle ham radio guys from Blackpool, UK and hams from the Orkneys, Pitcairn, Rarotonga, and similar places.

So it's not my antenna that is the issue. The ionosphere is fading. It is what it is.

My health is OK, my cat is doing OK. The weather is getting better. It's 75 degrees F outside right now. The trees are late, of course. They always used to be green by April 5th. Now they're just starting to bud in the hills. They'll probably be two weeks late, as it's been since 2018. Whether this is related to the reduced solar activity since the 1990's is a good question. It's probably due to other, meteorological factors.

But I'm still alive and kicking. I'm still playing the bagpipes, nearly every day. I still ride my bike at night, or in early mornings. I still work out with weights most days.

Life goes on.

Until next time, my friends.

Peace.

C.C., April 6th, 2026.

NOTE, April 11th, 2026.:

I originally put a title on this blog note, and it didn't save. That's because the internet was so bad. So I've just titled it. Hopefully the internet will be more dependable with a new service. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.