NorthEast Radio Watch 6/29/2026: iHeart Keeps Cutting

In this week’s issue… iHeart cuts leave some small markets vacant – Townsquare makes more NJ moves – Format shuffles in the Connecticut River Valley – Veteran meteorologists retire – Toronto AM seeks FM voice

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Programming note: barring major breaking news, of which we’ve had too much already, we’ll take a holiday break and return with our next regular NERW column on July 13. Want to read a different side of my writing in the meantime? Check out my daily reviews of the Rochester International Jazz Festival this past week for WGMC, Jazz 90.1.

*After 32 years of writing this column, I’m not going to even try to sugarcoat this week’s lead story. The job cuts across so many iHeart local markets are bad for the good radio people who are out of work with few other options in a tough job market. They’re bad for listeners in markets such as Erie and Atlantic City that now have no local talent at all in their clusters. They’re bad for the competitors who have to try to sell against zombie clusters in their markets. They’re bad for the overall image of the industry.

And no amount of corporate-speak about “putting our listeners and our communities first” or “our dedication to creating new opportunities for our top personalities” or “Guaranteed Human” can mask what’s really happening: a toxic combination of declining ad revenues across all media, the drain of debt service that eats up whatever revenues iHeart’s radio stations still produce, the reality that no commercial broadcaster has ever successfully run both small-market stations and top-10 market clusters, plus one more factor nobody wants to talk about.

Out of all the radio companies in the US, iHeart comes closest to having enough stations in enough markets to attempt something that’s only been done until now by noncommercial networks like K-Love: a truly national radio programming platform. At some point, it seems inevitable that iHeart will get there, both for economy of scale and because it just makes sense – if you’re feeding most of your stations with talent from somewhere else, and if you’ve centralized most of your music scheduling, why not feed the very best of your talent to Sacramento, Syracuse and Springfield all at once?

Instead, iHeart seems determined to keep chipping away, quarter after quarter, leaving whoever’s left at its stations wondering when they’ll meet the axe and what’s next for them, while also leaving listeners in the dark about what’s happened to their local voices and why. (Even with all the diligence of our content partner, Lance Venta’s RadioInsight.com, we still don’t have a complete list of everyone who’s lost their jobs; the company refuses to provide that information and we are, of course, loath to put names out there that haven’t been confirmed by the ousted talent themselves.)

Which means that as bad as last week was – and maybe this week, too, since we don’t know if the cuts are finished – the only certainty is that even more pain is coming next quarter, and the quarter after that.

Keep reading for our subscriber-exclusive rundown of what’s happened in each NERW-land market so far…