Radio - Clear Channel: Skinned in the game

The Clear Channel managers returned from last week’s Dallas meetings with their procedural dictates for their market as ordered by BainCapital and Thomas H. Lee.

Evidently, Bain and Lee are more skilled at reading the room than the Mark Mays’ slash and burn management contingent and didn’t want their Clear Channel’s radio division to be on the radar when it went into massacre maneuvers.

So leave it to Bain-Lee and their newly acquired fiendish family to jointly tweak the privation.

The firings, which were expected to occur yesterday, will actually come to pass next Tuesday, the 20th.

So not only the employees but the families that depend on them will have to deal with this sadistic countdown to irresolute joblessness for a few more days.

Tom Petty said it well. The waiting is the hardest part.

The drawn out week-and-a-day delay of execution was caused by an inopportune scheduling glitch.

Clear Channel couldn’t do its customary pink slip mass firing Friday because the date, the 16th, falls between Martin Luther King’s actual birthday - the day before - and the official holiday the following Monday.

Martin Luther King may have said “I have a dream” but Mark Mays is best known for “I have a scheme.”

But here’s the godsend for Clear Channel. Tuesday is Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The media coverage of the inaugural ceremony and surrounding events are expected to exceed November 4th’s media blitz of President-elect Obama’s victory. Barring a major contingency – the Obama inauguration will be only news story on Tuesday – and the following day.

To paraphrase Billy Idol, it’s a nice day for a mass firing.

So as Barack Obama gets sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, Clear Channel managers will be sacking an estimated one-thousand employees throughout the chain.

The first vision that came to my mind was the baptism scene in The Godfather. You know the one.

Michael Corleone is the Godfather at the christening of his nephew and namesake. The scene continuously crosscuts from the church to the set-up and execution of five murders of gang leaders. While the murders occur, Michael remains solemn at the church while listening to the holy recitations of the priest during the baptism.

Think about it. The only variation is that Clear Channel is using the backdrop of the Obama inauguration as its opportunity to make a clean kill.

Clear Channel used to be called “Cheap Channel.” Now it’s known as the “Characteristically Cruel.”

Remember that scene later on in The Godfather when Sal Tessio realizing that his betrayal of the Corleone family was evident attempts a futile mea culpa and begs for his life to be spared?

He says that memorable line to Coleone family consigliore Tom Hagan, “It was only business.”

That one became the s.o.p. close for Clear Channel managers to use when terminating an employee.

In the old days mobsters would pony up and take care of incidentals for the widows and family of those they whacked so they were never left to want – or squeal to the cops.

Proving that they have a heart, black as it may be, Clear Channel is rumored to be offering its terminated non-contract employees who had worked full-time and steadily for three years or longer nine months of severance provided they sign a don’t squeal to the media non-disclosure form.

John Hogan’s picked up on the buzzword “re-engineering” to describe the Brave - I mean - Bain New World of Clear Channel.

I have to clarify this. The Clear Channel version is less of the “re-engineering” as defined by Edward de Bono and Robert Heller and more like the “re-engineering” of the Soviet Union’s military after World War II.

Clear Channel’s “re-engineering” is a national centralization and dictate of policy, top-to-bottom, for programming and sales. That means national formats, national decisions, and less localism.

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Does this present an opportunity for rival chains to make a move against Clear Channel’s weakened state? Doubtful. Most expect the other major radio chains to fall in line like waddling penguins all-in-a-row, mimicking Clear Channel’s every move.

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Radio isn’t dying as much as it’s disappearing. Instead of finding new ways and means of being essential and engaging, it takes the opposite tack, which will result in further alienation with the declining radio audience.

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As the great convergence to the Internet moves forward, the modern world will leave terrestrial radio behind. The second decade of the 21st century will hold little promise for terrestrial radio unless there is massive change in leadership, attitude, and direction.

Hints of a massive downsizing at Clear Channel had been circulating since before Thanksgiving – but that didn’t stop Mark Mays from firing off a first-of-year-memo. He said, Beginnings are a gift. They are an opportunity to put past disappointments behind us. They are a chance to tap new resolve. They allow us the prospect for renewal. He predicted a recession that would be broad, deep, and sustained.

He asked for focus, which he defined as the ability to get the job done amidst the uncertainty and distraction that a recession can bring. And ultimately, focus gives us the opportunity to succeed when others fail.

He asked for resilience and to see the glass half full.

He asked for determination, claiming that Clear Channel has always been the company that leads our industries out of the difficulties – and ended his memo by telling his surviving workaholics that they have the best resources in the industry at their disposal and You have the confidence and the support of everyone in this organization.

Now, could you imagine an honestly-written memo that says: We screwed up. We just couldn’t resist all of these greedy opportunities put in front of us. We put ourselves under a convenient cloak of invisibility so we could blame others for our shortcomings. Our only business was monkey business.

You may lose your job because we couldn’t keep ourselves from dropping our draws to keep the clients we had on the air.

There are those that take and those who can’t hold. There are givers and there are takers. We thought we were one thing when we were actually the other.

We refused to acknowledge our mistakes and recognize the facts about our industry. We’ve allowed our blinded greed to metastasize. Now, it’s feeding on itself and we just can’t comprehend why.

And now the Mays family will bequeath its legacy to a band of brigands known as a BainCapital and Thomas H. Lee and laugh all the way to the bank.