By FishbowlLA Staff
Going into the long holiday weekend, the LA media story wasn’t at a newspaper or a studio — it was on the radio dial. iHeartMedia spent the week swinging the axe across its 800-plus stations, the May ratings book landed with the first hard numbers on the KNX simulcast split, and the local press corps got dressed up at the Biltmore to hand each other some well-earned hardware. Here’s your week.
iHeart’s “worst layoff round in radio history” reaches Southern California
The memo went out June 24, and by this week the cuts were rolling market by market: iHeartMedia is slashing on-air staff across the country as part of a “programming realignment” that industry tracker Lance Venta of RadioInsight predicts will go down as the worst layoff round in radio history. RadioInsight’s running casualty list — updated again July 1 — now stretches from Providence to Seattle.
The Southern California toll so far is concentrated in the Inland Empire: at Riverside’s Rhythmic CHR KGGI, midday host Evelyn Erives is out after more than two decades — she joined as morning co-host in 2002 and also pulled weekend and fill-in shifts at 103.5 KOST in Los Angeles — along with afternoon host Garrison King. Also gone: Jon Jeffries, the iHeart Sports Radio Network executive producer who oversaw programming in 51 markets including LA. Notably absent from the public lists so far: iHeart’s marquee LA cluster (KFI, KIIS, KOST, Real 92.3). Whether that’s mercy or just sequencing, nobody in Burbank is saying — the realignment is explicitly ongoing.
May book lands: first read on the KNX split — and KFI is climbing
Nielsen’s May PPM numbers for Los Angeles dropped July 1, and they carry the first partial read on Audacy’s May 18 breakup of the KNX news simulcast. KNX-AM slid from a 4.1 to a 3.5 share with its FM signal gone for the final stretch of the survey, while the new “97.1 The Fan” sports outlet debuted at a barely-there 0.1 with a cume of about 109,000. Meanwhile KFI — the direct beneficiary if news/talk listeners go shopping — ticked up to a 3.9, its best showing in the six-month view, just as its parent company guts staff elsewhere. Radio is nothing if not ironic.
Elsewhere in the book: KOST holds the market crown at 7.1, and KCRW gave back some of its spring gains, dipping from 2.6 to 2.2. The June book — the first full survey without KNX on FM — is the one to watch.
THR hauls 20 trophies at the Press Club’s big night
Following up on the gala we previewed last week: the LA Press Club handed out the 68th Southern California Journalism Awards Sunday night, June 28, at the Millennium Biltmore, and The Hollywood Reporter walked away the big winner with 20 first-place trophies — more than any other outlet — including honors for Gary Baum and Seth Abramovitch. IndieWire’s staff took a best-website prize and PBS SoCal touted a 20-trophy haul of its own, so expect dueling bragging-rights press releases well into July.
The night’s special honorees went home as announced: Maria Ressa with the Daniel Pearl Award, Craig Melvin with the President’s Award, ABC7’s Rob Fukuzaki with the Quinn Award for lifetime achievement, and civil-rights attorney Carol Sobel with the Guardian Award for defending press freedom — a fitting choice in a year when LA journalists have spent as much time in court as on the street.
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter →
That’s the week
That’s the week in LA media. Working at a station bracing for the next round of iHeart cuts, or know who’s next on the list? Our fishbowl is always open — send us a tip and we’ll keep you anonymous. Back next Friday.