Talk about pennywise and pound foolish. In its never ending quest to trim fat where there isn't any, iHeart Radio in the U.S. recently cut a huge swath through its engineering staff throughout the country. That left some stations unequipped to deal with the day to day reality of, oh, I don't know, running a radio station. 

And so it came to inevitably pass that two AMs, four FMs and two translators in Georgia were knocked of the air when a universal power supply failed. But there was no one there to fix it. In fact, they had to send engineers to the site - from 700 miles away! 

According to an article by Richard Waggoner, one of my favourite radio columnists in the U.S.:

iHeart...cut the engineer positions after running out of other things to cut. They already cut talent, advertising executives, promotions, and more. The fact that they don’t appear to be able to afford engineers seems to indicate they are unfit to own even one station, let alone the 860 that it does....

"It is long past the time for Congress and the FCC to break up these groups and limit ownership to a more reasonable 50 stations nationwide." 

In the same article, Waggoner cites a station in Las Vegas that has been so hard hit by the pandemic economy, that it's actually shut down until the crisis ends and things pick up. They still have the licence but they won't turn the TX or the stream back on until there are signs of a recovery. 

Scroll down to the second story here to read the article.