Death by a Thousand Cuts

 

Taylor Swift has a cool breakup song by this name, Death by a Thousand Cuts, which sort of applies to an industry I spent decades in: radio and TV broadcasting. Many of my colleagues, past and present, will disagree and preach about how vital radio and TV broadcasting still is. But it’s dying a slow death because of the rise of streaming and social media.

In the past few days, two more of my friends have been summarily dismissed from their jobs, being told, ‘Your position has been eliminated.” Pat is a real radio pro with decades of experience. He was doing the morning show on a Country radio station in Madison, Wisconsin. And JB, a consummate professional who worked for years in that same building for that same company, wearing many hats, was shown the door last week– also after decades of work for that company – and literally escorted out of the building.

Cruel. Brutal. Harsh. Heartless.

Scores of my friends have met a similar fate.

The firing of top-shelf radio entertainers and informers has been going on since 2008, the year I was thrown under the bus. My friend Glen and I and several of our colleagues were fired on the same day in November of 2008 during “The Great Recession.” Glen and I represented two of the highest salaries in the company. Both of us were shareholders and partners in the corporation; both of us had held many top management positions within the company and its affiliated stations across the Midwest.

The company’s bottom line instantly looked better, with our paychecks now a thing of the past.

A state-of-the-art broadcast facility built in 2006 at a cost of millions of dollars was the new home office for the company for which I’d worked for literally decades.. The building was home to seven radio stations. The entire second floor of the massive structure was devoted to brand new studios and programming offices. Dozens of professional broadcasters were engaged in the daily activities of preparing and delivering entertainment and information to thousands and thousands of listeners.

Those hallways and offices and studios must be pretty empty now.

The same axe-wielding has also been going on with television professionals. Craig’s List and similar operations, along with the dawning of the social media age, deeply damaged radio and TV -and print media -by decimating advertising sales. Streaming and social media have become juggernauts in dissemination of entertainment and information, once the exclusive province of print and heritage mainstream broadcasting.

And as Pat and JB join Glen and me among the ranks of those many professionals who’ve been summarily dismissed in the past 17 years, I can’t help but call it a part of broadcasting’s death by a thousand cuts.

A day is coming, not that far down the road, when they’ll turn off the lights and shut down the transmitters forever.