Walton doesn’t blame the cuts on a computer; he blames them on the company’s top executives, whose “coldblooded, calculated move” cost people their jobs. But the cuts at iHeartMedia and other companies also highlight a little-noticed element of these mass layoffs: the human decision-makers who lead them. “To have radio DJs across the country that really care about song transitions and are listening to find everything wrong, that was awesome,” Zalon said. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission ditched a rule requiring radio stations to maintain a studio near where they were broadcasting. Local DJs have since been further replaced by prerecorded substitutes, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.

Source: Washington Post January 31, 2020 12:00 UTC