Tipped off by a BRogue post in the B&B section, I found this article:

http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/news/88 ... r-crm-more



So, $24 million in billings in 2016, and they're paying $10 million a year to the Cubs for the rights to broadcast games. That leaves $14 million from which they have to pay talent and production salaries (including the pre-/post- and talent salaries for Cubs broadcasts), pay sales people, service equipment, benefits and taxes, etc.

Looks like they're turning a nice profit, but if the billings are as concentrated in Cubs baseball broadcasts as I would think, those 2-shares in the ratings will catch up with them when the Cubs move their IP elsewhere or cease to be amazing.

The Ricketts family is buying up media entities. I can see them buying an struggling station and putting the Cubs there.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

I was reading on Larz that the thought was breaking even at best even with the 24M.

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Elections have consequences.

Which is why salaries are going down over there. Bernstein will have to take a pay cut if he wants to stay.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

I guess it's about how you allocate all of it on paper, because the true profitability of the station and what it produces versus what it can reasonably bill is obfuscated by the presence of the other CBS stations in the cluster. So WBBM can "pay" for all of the office space of the cluster, and WSCR doesn't have that "expense", and so forth.

$14 million is still a lot of money to play with. Even if every weekday on-air talent represented $500K per year in total expenditures (salary, taxes, benefits) for the station, and each non-on-air person assigned to each show $150K, and we assume two individual support guys per show, that's $5 million a year in on-air weekday talent (M&H, S&P, B&G, Holmes, Grobber, Cubs Broadcast Duo), and $3.3 million a year in support staff.

That leaves roughly $5.7 million for office space, rent, sales people, and other regular business expenses. I don't know exactly how much it costs to blast 50,000 Watts into the air all-day, every day--and it is not insignificant--but I just don't see the rest of the revenue being burned through paying for secretaries and bulk coffee creamer.

They did $2M more in revenue last year than they did in 2015.

They paid $10M for the Cubs. The numbers speak for themselves.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... story.html


Despite lower ratings and revenue, WGN has improved its balance sheet since losing the Cubs, according to WGN President Jimmy de Castro.

"We weren't profitable, and we're very profitable now," de Castro said.

In addition to the $10 million rights fees, The Score has to pay the play-by-play team of Pat Hughes and Ron Coomer, along with engineering, marketing and sales expenses

Rosen declined to comment on whether The Score was in the black with the broadcasts. Rod Zimmerman, the former market manager of CBS Radio Chicago who helped engineer the Cubs deal, was ousted in a management shake-up in January. Some industry sources point to the cost of the Cubs broadcast rights as leading to his exit, but Zimmerman stands by the deal as a winner for CBS.

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That answers everything, the guy who was the architect for the cubs deal was fired, the next boob in charge refuses to say the station is in the black


Sports radio is a dying industry, even with cheap personal like Goff,Holmes,Grobstein the station can't cope. I'd be interested in to know how much that meathead Mitch Rosen makes.

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That sentence pretty much says it all.

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they are raking in the dough with all those millennials sitting around their radios listening to Len and the Coom-Dog.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

White Sox fans called it!

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

So appropriate that Cub broadcasts will lead to a lower salary for Dan

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

All radio is dying.

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So if I'm reading this right, adding the Cubs has resulted in a loss of $8 million from the bottom line?

Holy shit it's no wonder Zimmerman got canned.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

I think some around here (CH maybe?) as well as in media try to sell some fact of synergy makes this all ok. They will lose or break even on WSCR and make more via the other CBS stations in town and so on. Well I do not believe that for a second. Zimmerman was the boss of all CBS radio in Chicago and got shit canned after this deal. There was a reason for that.

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Elections have consequences.

It's ironic because Zimmerman was always known as a budget slasher. He never spent to make. The only way he knew how to increase profits was to cut expenses. Then he did this and it got him canned.

There are some funny stories about guys at the station negotiating with him.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

It's a logical theory that he may have been a Cubs fan and thus had serious blinders on while getting this deal done.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Could be or he had some hard on to stomp WGN and WLS.

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Elections have consequences.

That's a deal that goes way above Zimmerman.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

No, it did not.

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what was it, 5-year $10MM/per?

$50MM goes close to the top of the house of any company, more than likely the big cheese.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

While big I do not think $50M is something that requires 20 sign offs in CBS. They have a net worth of 30.6 Billion.

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Elections have consequences.

I would say $50MM goes to the head of national radio operations and at least an OK from the CFO of CBS.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

$50 Million is a lot...even for a huge corporation like CBS Radio. At the very least, the suits had an idea of what was going on.

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Good point. He was the one calling WGN 720 stupid for losing the Cubs. That his boss was REALLY SMART for getting them. But no profit from them. Probably not even breaking even.

CBS Radio once had a company-wide mandate to drop baseball play-by-play because they were unhappy with MLBAM. It cost them the Pirates on KDKA and the Cardinals on KMOX and was considered a lose-lose, especially in St. Louis, where KMOX lost its cornerstone property and no one could hear Cardinals games over the air like they used to. Maybe they considered it a lesson learned and tried not to intervene in such matters anymore.

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Someone else may have signed off on it, but if this deal was Zimmerman's baby, then he was the one to take the fall for it.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Zimmerman is a Cardinals fan.

The only way the deal makes any sense is if WSCR projected that when the Cubs got good, they could increase billings by at least $10m per year. Maybe that happens in years 2-5, but I doubt it.

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Well, they were good in 2015 when WBBM had them. They won 100 games that year. So you would have thought the billing hike would have happened for the 2016 season. Obviously it didn't.

The numbers are the numbers. Even though the Cubs are popular. Most people are watching the games on TV or on their phones.

Which he did.

Bidding against himself to the tune of $4M per year extra didn't help his cause either.

And yes dolphin, the most ironic part of this is that Dan will have to take less on his next contract go around.

NOT REALLY THAT SMART OF GUY AFTER ALL.

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