In the past few days, Cumulus has been pulling most of its news/talk programming in-house – specifically switching its stations to John Batchelor and Redeye Radio.
They’ve also dumped Michael Savage on a few stations and replaced him with Mark Levin (no suprise there).
While Sean Hannity was orignally owned by ABC Radio (then Citadel), Hannity “Opted Out” of his contract with ABC/Citadel and switched to Clear Channel’s Premiere in 2009 – but with the condition that ABC would continue to syndicate the show on their stations and share in Premiere’s advertising revenue. Where that contract stands at this point is not obvious – it probably didn’t anticipate a future where Cumulus would own ABC.
Of course, every schedule change opens up opportunity for other stations in the market to pick up the shows that have been dropped, so changes are cascadng all over the place.
For now, most of the change is in the evening and overnight, but it’s only a matter of time until the daytime gets the Cumulus cost reduction program.
Redeye Radio is the big winner so far – not only are the Cumulus stations switching to the trucking radio guys, but a substantial number of non-Cumulus stations are picking up the show .