Months before COVID, iHeart dumped over 1,000 employees.
Then COVID handed iHeart’s beleaguered owners a “gift” and they used it to substantially eliminate more jobs as advertising took a hit.
This pattern of firing, layoffs, furloughs, “dislocations” and “excellence hubs” (as they called them) morphed into employees taking off a few weeks from the company with no pay.
iHeart billing is off as much as 50% as they continue to burn through what cash they have left to keep operating.
All this as Liberty Media awaits the DOJs ruling on whether they will be allowed to make a takeover bid even as iHeart searches for foreign money to prop them up.
Now they’re going to get serious about cost cutting in some vulnerable markets (over 80%) and it’s going to look and feel desperate and not unnoticed by other radio groups.
