WNUA-FM's Rick O'Dell fired, Clear Channel starts cutting

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: WNUA-FM's Rick O'Dell ousted as Clear Channel starts cutting : --------------- : : Rick O'Dell, a veteran of nearly 20 years at WNUA-FM 95.5, this morning became the first Chicago casualty of a long-anticipated restructuring by parent Clear Channel Communications aimed at cutting $400 million in costs. : "With the industry being as short-staffed as it is, this might be a case where the survivors have it worse than the people let go," said O'Dell, who hosted a 9 a.m.-to-2 p.m. weekday show and a one-hour weekend program while also serving as music director and program director at the "smooth jazz" station. "The people who are left there, they were overworked to begin with. It's not going to be a good situation for them." : Rumors of cutbacks leading into and coming out of a meeting of all Clear Channel managers two weeks ago in Texas built to a crescendo in recent days. The Wall Street Journal has reported the company will lay off about 7 percent of its U.S. staff -- about 1,500 employees, mostly in ad sales -- and replace more local shows with syndicated content. : : All radio companies have made cuts in the past year or so as the economics of the business has changed. Clear Channel was hamstrung by the 18-month effort to take the company private, a process that concluded last summer. : Some have suggested Clear Channel's cuts were timed to coincide with Tuesday's presidential inauguration so the news would be buried under the coverage of President Barack Obama taking office. : Both of Clear Channel Chicago's spokeswomen would be out of the office and unavailable for comment until at least Wednesday, according to their ooutgoing voice mails messages. : Earl Jones, Clear Channel's president and Chicago market manager, was quoted just last summer calling O'Dell, 49, "an icon in Chicago radio. A veteran of nearly 20 years at WNUA, O'Dell had been working without a contract since the beginning of the year. : O'Dell had updated his page on the WNUA Web site and was pre-taping the final hour of what would have been today's broadcast ostensibly so he could attend a scheduled staff meeting to discuss the cuts when he was asked to see Tony Coles, his direct boss. : It was only when O'Dell saw a human resources representative bringing Coles a stack of envelopes, which turned out to be termination packets, that he began to realize what was happening. Coles told him he would be escorted from the building. : "In 20 years of working there, there's a lot of stuff, but I put as much as I could in my gym bag," O'Dell said."This poor guy who works in the mailroom at Clear Channel has been given the job all day long of escorting all the people who've been laid off to the elevator and seeing them off." : O'Dell took the ouster, while unexpected, in stride. : "It's been about 40 percent disappointment, 60 percent relief, to be honest with you," he said. "They have been putting the screws to middle management in Chicago for the last five or six months so much that on the one hand it's the loss of a job, on the other it's a sigh of relief. : "I think there are others who will feel this way too," O'Dell continued. "They had cut to the bone so severely that anyone who still had a job was essentially doing two to three jobs. ... Just three years ago, they had four separate full-time jobs for the one job that I was doing when I was let go. That's how far they trimmed. Every station in the cluster was under the gun in the same sort of way." : : (Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune)

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