Radio Insight and Barrett Sports Media have been reporting on the layoffs taking place at Audacy, which is based in Philadelphia and owns Sports Radio 94 WIP, KYW News Radio, 1210 WPHT, and a few other local stations.

So far, no Philly layoff news that I’ve seen, which is good, but other markets haven’t been as fortunate. In Milwaukee, Audacy laid off the entire staff of 1250 the Fan:

Stunning sports radio news out of Milwaukee. 1250-AM The Fan has suddenly removed all of its local programming and switched over to CBS Sports Radio.

…

The station’s stream is currently airing CBS Sports Radio. The local daily lineup has also been removed from the 1250 The Fan website although show podcasts still remain.

In regards to the station’s talent, most have been quiet since the news began to trickle out. The Milwaukee Business Journal reported that recent NFL Hall of Famer and former Green Bay Packer LeRoy Butler was part of the cuts. Bart Winkler, Tim Allen, and Gary Ellerson are expected to be out as well.

I haven’t seen or heard anything about WIP or WFAN, which really isn’t surprising. Those major market sports stations do well for Audacy and are among the highest billers in the cluster, so I can’t imagine they’d look there for cuts.

One of the nuggets you may have read elsewhere is that Audacy received a warning from the NYSE because the stock price dipped so low. Inside Radio wrote this two weeks ago:

The last time Audacy’s stock price closed above one dollar was July 5 with its share price down 73% year-to-date. That has triggered a warning from the New York Stock Exchange that radio’s second-biggest company is not in compliance with NYSE rules. The Exchange requires companies to have a minimum average closing price of $1.00 per share over 30 consecutive trading days. Audacy has not had that and so it has received notification that it could face delisting if the price is not brought back up.

In a statement released late Thursday, Audacy says it plans to notify the New York Stock Exchange that it intends to regain compliance and is considering “all available options” that are open to it. The company is scheduled to report its second quarter revenue today (Aug. 5) and the results could give the stock price the boost it needs.

Audacy stock is currently sitting at 68 cents a share. That’s rough. I’ve talked to people who bought the stock at 11 dollars, four dollars, etc, thinking it “couldn’t go any lower,” but here we are in 2022. Pre-pandemic, the stock was sitting around $4.75, then it tanked during COVID, just like everything else, though it rebounded to $6.26 in February of 2021 and has slowly declined since.

Back when the 2017 CBS Philly/Entercom merger took place, the stock price topped out around $12.

This is something to keep an eye on. I can’t imagine they make more cuts in Philly, since it’s their home base and stations like WPHT are already running on a bare bones setup to begin with. They axed some people during the pandemic, too, so the last round of layoffs wasn’t that long ago.