NorthEast Radio Watch 11/11/2024: iHeart, Cumulus Cut Deeper

In this week’s issue… iHeart axes Boston, NYC morning shows and more – Cumulus cuts in central PA – Southern Tier combo saved from silence – Ottawa FM relaunches – K-Love buys in the Burgh – Scranton gets “Loud” – All-digital NYC AM test

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada

*This hurts.

Over the years, we’ve had the unhappy duty of reporting on job cuts across our ever-changing industry, and here we are in the 31st year of this column still finding ourselves sharing the news of even more good radio people being shown the door through no fault of their own.

This past week, it was iHeart Media in that sad spotlight, making some of the deepest cuts we’ve seen in all those decades. We still don’t know all of the names missing from iHeart stations across the region, but with the assistance of our colleague Lance Venta at RadioInsight, we have far too many names to tell you about this week, so many in fact that it’s hard to know where to start.

In NEW YORK, Len Berman and Michael Riedel are out at WOR (710), where Berman had been on mornings for just short of a decade, joined by Riedel in 2018. Their morning news editor and producer, Terry Trahim, is also out after a run that went back 20 years to the Buckley Broadcasting era of WOR (which seems like so long ago now, doesn’t it?)

We know there are other cuts in New York, too, among promotions and support staff in the cluster. We don’t yet know what will fill mornings on WOR, which lists only “WOR Morning News” on its schedule starting today.

The Boston cluster also took a huge hit, starting at the top with regional president Alan Chartrand. He’d been in that role since 2014, and of course has had a long and storied 40-year career in the market for decades before that, including serving as the founding GM of WJMN (Jam’n 94.5) in 1994 and time in management with Greater Media and Entercom before returning to Clear Channel in 2011.

For listeners, the more visible cut was on iHeart’s WZLX (100.7), where the company pulled the plug on Rich Shertenlieb’s morning show after just five months.

Never one to mince words, Shertenlieb was one of the more vocal of the iHeart dismissals.

“To say that I’m disappointed is an understatement,” he wrote in a letter to listeners.

“When we launched the show at the end of May, the plan was simple. We would take the months of Summer to build chemistry with the new cast and by Fall and football season, we would be close to sounding what our vision of the show would be. However, just over two months into the show, management decided to alter the format. They wanted music, I did not. However despite my disagreement about the decision, I agreed to move forward and music was added. After starting from scratch, watching the show fanbase grow and the interaction with the fans increase as they became part of our radio family is one my proudest accomplishments in all my years of broadcasting. I’ve never been part of that much growth, ever,” Shertenlieb said.

Shertenlieb was always a somewhat risky choice for the staid classic rock station. As NERW readers know well, his exit from his previous gig as half of the “Toucher and Rich” morning show on Beasley’s WBZ-FM (98.5 the Sports Hub) was especially acrimonious, following months of tension with co-host Fred Toucher – and his arrival at WZLX never sat well with listeners who had become accustomed to the longtime “Karlson, McKenzie and Heather” morning show, only to see Pete McKenzie and Heather Ford dropped not long after the death of Kevin Karlson.

Would his show eventually have attracted some of his former Sports Hub audience without losing more of WZLX’s music-focused listeners? We’ll never know – and as with most of these cuts, it’s not yet clear what will replace Shertenlieb on WZLX now.

[Why subscribe to NERW? Because for subscribers, there’s so much more to this week’s column, including exclusive insight into why iHeart made this cuts and what its strategy looks like moving forward.]