As part of a consolidation of its facilities in LA, Dial Global is moving some operations at its Valencia and Brentwood offices to Culver City. As a result, 28 out of 35 staffers in Valencia were let go. The remaining seven will now be based in Culver City. Dial Global Pres. Programming Kirk Stirland tells RBR-TVBR this is all a part of their ongoing restructuring. In addition, he says only six of those laid off were full-time in weekday dayparts. “The rest were part-timers. And understand that these part timers were typically a person that might come in and do one shift on the weekend for one of our formats. And many of them don’t even do that. Many are kind of on the bench if we need anyone for a sick day, vacation or something like that.”
The Valencia and Brentwood offices will be shuttered as well, he confirms: “We’re consolidating the operations in both. Brentwood is ad sales, traffic and back office functions. There are about 20 or so people there. They’ll be going to Culver City, as well as all of the operations in Valencia. We had the former WW1 facility there. It was actually three buildings—WW1, Metro Traffic and the studio facility. The studio facility had a little bit of capacity, so we used that. We were able to sublet the old WW1 space, but the Metro Traffic space didn’t. So we elected to take that and will build some studios in there and add admin. Overall, we didn’t have the capacity to produce as many dayparts for the 24 hour formats.”
Some of the dayparts for the 24-hour formats that were produced out of Valencia will now be produced in Denver or Dallas. Most of the remaining on-air talent at the 24/7 Dial Global formats will also be located either in Dallas or Denver.
Stirland also tells us all of those dayparts and shifts are going to be hired for and replaced in Denver and Dallas. Of the six full-timers, several of them are talking about relocating to Denver and Dallas in the process. “So this may be a downsizing in LA, but it’s an upsizing in Denver. There is no net loss of jobs.”
