RIF's have been happening under Berner just as they had with the Dickeys. Despite a change in culture and the way the company is being run, most of those positions cut in '08 and '09 haven't come back. The only areas where Cumulus is growing staff at any real rate is the digital side. Those challenges, BTW, aren't just affecting Cumulus. Every radio company is struggling with being a zero-growth medium while trying to grow the only side of the business that's actually growing. As we've discussed before, costs of digital streams are high while margins are low. Costs go up the more listeners you get, and the margins don't go up by nearly enough (if at all).
InsideRadio is reporting the potential sale of the company is causing anxiety, though no one thinks it will be as bad as when the Dickeys ran the operation. Warshaw may not have experience running a company as large as Cumulus, but I don't know if that matters all that much. If he knows what he's doing, he knows what he's doing. The big concern is that no one at the local level knows whether or not he knows what he's doing.
I will preface what I'm about to say by saying I know and completely understand that for profit businesses are about making money, and, when they don't make money, good people, both inside and outside of the operations, get hurt. I've worked for both privately held and publicly traded companies. My experience has been that the privately held operations treat their employees better. I've worked for two publicly traded companies. One was Cumulus when the Dickeys ran it; the other was a large telecommunications company that has since been bought. Neither of those companies felt any obligation to anyone but their shareholders. The employees were merely the people who kept the stock prices up. Both of them had employee stock purchase programs, which, in theory, allowed their employees to own a piece of the company and have a voice in the company's direction, but I was never aware of any rank and file employee who was ever able to get enough shares in the company to be able to affect any of the decisions where shareholders were allowed a vote. Most (though maybe not all) publicly traded companies are set up to make the rich richer. The rank and file employees could never buy enough shares to compete with wealthy people and private equity. The privately held companies where I worked at least tried to think of their employees and how to keep them happy. They had a stronger connection to the people who worked for them and understood that their people made them their money. That doesn't mean that they were operated by good or smart people, but they cared, at least a little, about their employees.
