SCPR To Cut More Than 10% Of Staff Positions, CEO Cites Budget Shortfall

Southern California Public Radio’s CEO said Tuesday the public broadcast network will eliminate more than 10% of its staff positions in response to a revenue shortfall he attributed primarily to a recent decline in Hollywood studio advertising.

Southern California Public Radio operates the LAist 89.3 radio station, the LAist website, and LAist Studios, which produces podcasts.

The CEO, Herb Scannell, said 21 of the organization's approximately 175 positions are being eliminated.

In total, 20 people were laid off, including nine unionized employees represented by SAG-AFTRA, according to Carlo Giovanni, the organization’s vice president of people and culture. One eliminated position was unfilled. All exiting employees were notified by midafternoon Tuesday and told it was their last day, Giovanni said.

The surprise announcement, shared in a memo and announced to staff in a brief Zoom meeting, follows similar cutbacks at a variety of other media outlets, including NPR and the Los Angeles Times.

In LAist’s case, Scannell said the cutbacks primarily involve administrative staff, producers and technicians and have another purpose: to allow LAist to rearrange its staffing to bolster the scope and speed of its online news reporting.

“We need more reporting,” he said.

LAist Chief Content Officer Kristen Muller said that need became clear in January when company officials compared the speed and scope of the station’s radio and online reporting as residents of Montecito were being evacuated during a heavy rain emergency. LAist 89.3’s on-air coverage was up to the minute, Muller said, while LAist.com stories appeared with a couple hours' delay.

“There was an enormous gap,” she said, and LAist’s leaders became convinced “we are not staffed properly to do both” timely reporting on air and on the website.

Scannell said he hopes to help correct the imbalance by creating at least seven new reporting and internal data analyst positions for the website over the next year.

“More and more folks are getting news online,” he said. “We need to figure out a way to develop [more online] loyalty.”

Annual revenue fluctuations in recent years

Publicly reported financial figures by Southern California Public Radio, which is organized as a nonprofit affiliate of NPR, show significant fluctuations in annual revenue in recent years. Revenue ranged from a low of $30 million in fiscal year 2018-19, when Scannell became CEO midyear, to a high of $42 million the following year. FY 2020-21 saw revenue dip to $37 million before rebounding to $42 million in FY 2021-22.

In an interview Tuesday morning, Scannell estimated that 20% to 25% of revenue comes from advertising, which has fallen off this year by “a couple of million dollars.” He attributed the falloff to “a cloud of [possible] recession hanging over” the economy and factors such as the current writer’s strike affecting Hollywood studios, which typically advertise heavily to promote their TV shows and movies.

Scannell said a substantial amount of revenue comes from contributions from listeners and readers, with much of the rest coming mainly from philanthropists.

An investment in podcasts, and now a turn back

When Scannell was named CEO in January 2019 after stints heading Nickelodeon and BBC Worldwide North America, he announced plans to widen Southern California Public Radio’s foray into podcasts, which he did.

Now, however, he plans to cut back. Podcasts are primarily funded through advertising. “The podcast industry has been a rollercoaster — a rollercoaster up and a rollercoaster down,” Scannell said. “Now it’s down.”

He said LAist’s signature podcasts, including “How to LA” and “LA Report,” will remain, and in the case of the investigative series “Imperfect Paradise,” will expand. But some short-run series will be eliminated.

Earlier this year, Scannell led a rebranding at Southern California Public Radio. Previously the radio station was called KPCC and the website LAist. Now both operations are under the same name.

Union shop stewards respond

The union ratified its latest contract in early May after 10 months of negotiations with SCPR management.

“We were all caught off guard by this,” said LAist Senior Reporter Jill Replogle, a SAG-AFTRA shop steward who was involved in recent contract negotiations. She said management had acknowledged in recent months that revenues were down but said “layoffs were not in the cards.”

Replogle said she hopes management will reconsider and offer buyouts instead.

She added that she and other union members recently expressed concerns about the wisdom of “a lot of money being spent [on salaries] at the very top.” She noted that the latest contract calls for a total of 7% raises this year for members and at least 2.75% annual raises for the following two years. But she said public disclosures by LAist for FY 2021-22 showed that Scannell’s compensation package that year soared by 56% over the prior fiscal year, to $674,000. She also noted that his predecessor, former CEO Bill Davis, was still being paid more than half a million dollars per year “and he’s been gone for three years.”

Financial disclosures on the organization’s website say the post-departure payments to Davis are “under the terms of agreement and due after his separation.” Replogle said her questions about Scannell’s earnings resulted in a meeting open to all staff at which Scannell defended his compensation as fair, noting he’d been paid more at other jobs.

Another shop steward, LAist reporter Caitlin Hernandez, said they too felt “shocked and blindsided” by the layoff announcement. “I am very worried for our unit and everyone who is being impacted. It didn’t have to happen this way.”

Hernandez said union members being laid off are contractually entitled to two weeks of severance pay for every year of employment.

In his memo announcing the layoffs, Scannell said, “All employees in eliminated roles will be offered severance packages and other resources to support their transition.”

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by on-call Senior Reporter Ted Rohrlich and edited by Senior Editors Mary Plummer and Paul Glickman. Under LAist's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.