I’ve been working on a couple of local media stories, nothing that amounts to a full post, but figured I had enough for a decent “notebook” type of article instead.

Some things I’ve been “efforting” –

1) Do you remember that story from February about the Philadelphia Inquirer pay discrimination issue? The union representing the writers filed a grievance because a white woman in the sports department was making more than a black man who was doing the same job. The update here is that after six months, there was no resolution, so this is headed to arbitration. According to the contract posted at the NewsGuild website, the grievance process “shall be settled by negotiations between a committee representing the Employer or its authorized representative, and a committee chosen by the Guild.” Seems like they couldn’t work it out that way.

Essentially what happened here is that the Inquirer bought out all of the veteran guys and made an effort to diversify the staff after the Temple report basically said the newspaper was too white and too male. During the process, specific employees were targeted, and offered good salaries to make the jump from their current jobs, so that resulted in the pay scale getting thrown out of whack, resulting in the grievance.

2) There was a seemingly minor issue with the Inquirer regarding college work. You might recall that when the likes of Joe Juliano and Marc Narducci departed, the paper began to fill college roles with students at those schools (Temple, etc). This created a conflict that was resolved by parameters being redrawn, i.e. they needed to set standards on how much work they could accept from college kids and how those outside contributors could chip in, since previously those roles were being filled by full-time union members.

3) Things at the Inquirer are clunky right now. Writers seem disgruntled. One thing that happened recently was editor Gabriel Escobar sent out a full-staff email noting a decline in digital audience and linking that, in part, to a drop in volume. Basically they weren’t publishing enough content, and the number of stories per writer is currently down. As a result, they put in some “publishing volume goals” for editors, paired with 1v1 meetings, to iron things out and get employees rolling again.

A more crude way of explaining this is that they are nicely asking people to start cranking shit out.

4) Audacy shot down the bankruptcy report, but that rumor has been going around for 3-4 weeks now. What happened is that the stock price dipped below a dollar in late June/early July, and the New York Stock Exchange issued a compliance warning. From there, you’re then given a certain amount of time to get your price back to $1 or higher, or else you can be de-listed entirely.

Audacy, which is based in Philly at 2400 Market Street, issued a round of layoffs during COVID (as did everyone), but then did another round two weeks ago, gutting its Milwaukee station entirely in the process. They own WIP and WFAN, but those stations are doing well. It’s the music stations and other assorted bloat that kind of drags them down. They also put money into podcasting, which is difficult to sell and scale, and in talking to people over there it just seems like their expenses are kind of whack.

One of the other things I was told is that reliant advertiser revenue isn’t quite there in 2022. The car dealerships are huge radio sponsors and they’ve dialed it back recently. The economy is kind of shit in general, and so the sales department doesn’t have as many slam dunk sponsors as they did even 4-5 years ago.

Another quirk here is that with the evolution of streaming and digital technology, it’s easier to track advertising performance on new mediums. What the fuck does that mean? Well, when you do a car dealer commercial on the radio, you throw it out there in the ether, and then maybe some guy shows up at Gary Barbera, or there’s someone looking at Google Analytics and cross-referencing site traffic when a radio ad runs. But when you do it on a stream, or podcast, or as a video on the website, you can more easily track how many people clicked on it, where they live, etc, and get so much more specific data, which is then relayed to the advertiser with the help of a third party vendor. There’s technology like “geofencing” in play now, so for advertisers who want to know what exactly they are getting results-wise, maybe there’s a proclivity to put more money into digital than previously.

5) Angelo Cataldi’s replacement? Nothing but radio silence here. I can’t even get anybody to pick up the phone or answer a text message right now. I personally believe Joe DeCamara is in the driver’s seat for the job, but they were supposed to announce a replacement in July and nothing happened.

Here’s my conspiracy theory –

I think they truly were interested in Mike Golic, but for whatever reason it didn’t work out. After I asked Golic Sr. and Golic Jr. to address the rumor on Twitter, people at WIP got mad at me (for doing nothing wrong) and seemed really sensitive about the topic, which suggests to me that something was there at some point. Later, Golic’s wife came out and tweeted this, which was very suspect:

I can’t confirm that she’s talking about Philly, but if you want to put your tinfoil hat on, you can piece together something plausible.

6) Beasley probably wants to get John Kincade signed to a contract extension, right? I think that’s the next order of business for them since The Best Show Ever? is taken care of and Cataldi is leaving soon. Might as well close that door and lock him up right now, you would think. I haven’t heard anything about Anthony Gargano’s status but on the WIP side, they do have some contract housekeeping to handle as well.

7) WIP has been mostly hammering the Fanatic this summer. Obviously Mikey Miss left and The Best Show Ever? is only a couple of weeks old, plus it’s the slowest part of the sports calendar, so there’s not a lot of stock to put in the ratings right now. But WIP has been on top for a long time and football season is just around the corner.

The most interesting thing here is how TBSE? stacks up against Marks and Reese when the Eagles get going in September. The Fanatic has some different avenues to traverse because they do the YouTube simulcasts and TBSE? airs on NBC Sports Philadelphia, but when it comes to traditional Nielsen scam data, WIP continues to rule in the key demographic, which is men aged 25-54. Fanatic does perform better in the men 18-34 demo, but that’s a less-important category for advertisers and sellers.