Posted by chicagomedia.org on January 21, 2009 at 07:23:25:
Clear Channel silent as O'Dell ousted
Phil Rosenthal | Chicago Tribune | Media
January 21, 2009
There are some who believe Clear Channel Communications timed its long-anticipated companywide elimination of about 1,850 jobs to coincide with President Barack Obama's inauguration Tuesday in the hope that the news would be lost in the shuffle.
What Clear Channel actually did with its dismissals in a bid to cut a reported $400 million in costs, including the unceremonious ouster of WNUA-FM 95.5 veteran Rick O'Dell, was punctuate a moment in history.
Obama in his inaugural address called the weakened economy "a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age."
One might say the same of the situation at Clear Channel, where cuts, expected since before Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners last year closed its $17.9 billion deal to take the company private, likely became more severe as a result of the economic downturn.
What's left is emblematic of a company, and the industry it leads, that for a decade or so believed resulting efficiencies would more than pay for consolidation and, when financial projections fell short after stations lost their individuality and edge in the marketplace, came to realize more cuts and sacrifices would be required.
"It harms the product so irreparably that it leaves you with a shell of what you were having difficulty selling before you made the cuts," 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. "This is the shame of where the business has come to now. … Even successful operations are filled with anxiety."
Just last summer Earl Jones, Clear Channel's president and Chicago market manager, called O'Dell, 49, "an icon in Chicago radio." On Tuesday, O'Dell had to stuff into his gym bag whatever souvenirs he could from almost 20 years at WNUA before being escorted to the elevator by a mailroom clerk.
Plenty of other names of on-air and behind-the-scenes personnel were floating around as also being among the cuts locally but could not be confirmed at press time.
Chicago Clear Channel management stonewalled, referring all inquiries to corporate headquarters in Texas. The company, in turn, would do no more than pass along a memo to surviving staff from Clear Channel Chief Executive Mark Mays.
"While a significant portion of these positions represent a realignment in our sales departments, the positions span all departments," Mays wrote, calling elimination of around 9 percent of the company workforce—across its radio, outdoor advertising and corporate operations—difficult but necessary.
"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," O'Dell said. "The people who are left there, they were overworked to begin with. It's not going to be a good situation for them."
O'Dell had updated his page on the WNUA Web site and was pretaping the final hour of what would have been his Tuesday 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. Yet he took the ouster 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 … 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."
Clear Channel didn't bury this story because, like what happened in Washington on Tuesday, its effects will be felt for a long time to come.