Photo Credit: Chris Little
Most of the news team at Los Angeles’ KFI 640 was decimated following the rampant iHeartMedia cuts, with 17 people at the station losing their jobs.
Most of the news team at KFI 640 in Los Angeles lost their jobs on Monday as part of iHeartMedia’s rampant job cuts across the nation. In an Instagram post, News Director Chris Little said 17 of the station’s 25 person news team were fired, including him.
Little’s Instagram post included a picture of the station’s Christmas tree, which was put up the day before the employees were let go. “Seventeen news people got fired today,” wrote Little. “We put up the tree yesterday. I’m one of the departed.”
Among those let go were KFI anchor Jo Kwon, editor Erin Ben-Moche, and reporters Corbin Carson and Kris Adler. Chris Little had been with the station since 1991, becoming News Director in 2000.
“A lot of people have left the building at iHeartMedia,” said Tim Conway Jr., who hosts his namesake show on KFI, addressing the layoffs at the beginning of his show on Monday.
KFI parent company iHeartMedia is cutting hundreds of jobs across the US to help curb debt, of which the company currently has around $5.21 billion in total. The company’s CEO Bob Pittman said during iHeartRadio’s Q3 financial call that the job cuts would help the company save around $150 million by “eliminating redundancies.”
“What we’re not doing is getting rid of air talent,” Pittman told Radio Ink last week in addressing the layoffs. “Because we’ve got technology, we can take talent we have in any location and put them on the air in another location. So it allows us to substantially upgrade the quality of our talent in every single market we’re in,” he explained. “There’s not a slot for everybody. Just because [talent] was willing to live in the market, doesn’t assure that they’re the best person for that slot.”
As a result of the layoffs, nearly 500 people have lost their jobs in major markets like Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, and many more.
