News

Kelli Hurley will now oversee all sales efforts for the company’s portfolio of digital products -- including streaming audio, on demand, and podcasting.

The Katz Media Group is arming radio managers and sellers with more data to back up how important a role radio can play in the 2016 election. On Monday, Katz released its third report as part of “The Local Vote 2016”– a single-source tool commissioned with Nielsen.

iHeart Media has named Tish Boden Senior VP of Sales for the Jacksonville/Brunswick market. Boden moves to Jacksonville from the iHeart New Orleans cluster where she was GSM. Boden has over 14 years in radio, having started out as an AE and on-air personality.

With the Wisconsin primary one week away, Donald Trump joined Sykes for an interview Monday. Sykes is a conservative backing Senator Ted Cruz. He told Trump, “Here in Wisconsin we value things like civility, decency, and actual conservative principles.” And the interview got nastier from there.

Perhaps Bernie Sanders' big win on Saturday was propelled by his domination on radio last week. According to Media Monitors, Sanders' campaign ran 3,358 spots and another 696 were run by the Healthcare Workers’ PAC National Nurses United For Patient Protection. That made his grand total for the last 10 days 4,054.

No succession plan or CEO search for Pandora. The abrupt change was announced in a press release Monday that founder Tim Westergren is back as CEO, replacing Brian McAndrews. McAndrews succeeded Joe Kennedy in September of 2013.

Shares of the Internet pure-play dropped nearly 10% following the CEO announcement so, at least for now, Wall Street is not looking at the change too positively. Westergren taking over follows a swirl of rumors about Pandora possibly being bought.

In his latest blog, immediately following the change at the top of Pandora, Cumulus/Westwood One CMO Pierre Bouvard asks the question, "Will Pandora be to streaming what MySpace was to social media?" Bouvard says Edison Research's latest Share of Ear study reveals why trouble is brewing for Pandora, specifically in the 18-24 demo.

Rick Martinez has been appointed to the newly created position of Vice President of News and Information Programming for Curtis Media. Martinez rejoins Curtis from the staff of Governor Pat McCrory where he was Deputy Communications Director.

The pharmacy chain surged to number two (from 18) on the Media Monitors weekly chart, airing just over 32,000 commercials on radio stations across the country last week. GEICO held on to the number one spot with 39,656. Rounding out the top five were AutoZone (30,105), Nissan Dealers (25,421), and McDonald's (25,007). Along with Walgreens, other big movers included Macy's (from 22 to 8) and Sprint (from 27 to 9).