Earlier this week, news surfaced that less than three years after joining WFAN as their program director, Spike Eskin was returning to Philadelphia’s 94WIP to co-host their afternoon show. Eskin will co-host WIP’s afternoon drive show with Ike Reese and Jack Fritz, filling the void recently created by Jon Marks.
Marks decided to leave one of the most famous radio shows in the region because he wanted to spend more time with his family. However, after exiting the show, Marks claimed he was fired from his weekend job at CBS Sports Radio because he publicly commented on Audacy’s financial situation.
Audacy, the radio and podcast company formerly known as Entercom that owns 227 radio stations nationwide and more, filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.
Shortly after he departed from WIP, Marks joined Crossing Broad’s Crossing Broadcast and opened up on his decision:
“I’ve known this was coming for a year. We tried to work things out and they (WIP management) were very respectful of the way I felt about everything… There’s the children thing, there’s the quality of life thing, and there’s the financial thing. And the financial thing was third. But it’s still a part of it, right? People will say ‘either it’s about your family or it’s not,’ but it also gets to a financial point where you say, ‘I can’t say no to that for my family.‘ I can’t say no to that. It can pay for my kids’ college, or I can buy a shore house to where I can spend more time and commute form the shore in the summer. There are ways you can get around it that help your quality of life when you’re still doing the same thing that maybe you hate. More vacation, more money, things like that.”
“…I was more or less going day-to-day, month-to-month because we didn’t have a contract agreement… I want everybody watching right now to understand this, that the company that owns WIP, Audacy, is 1.9 billion dollars in debt. Now how do you get out of debt? Well you have to pay off your debt. So next year they owe four or five hundred million in debt service. They’re losing money on a quarterly basis. So when your business loses money, how do you pay off half a billion dollars of debt coming up? You lay people off, you cut costs, and even then it’s not doing anything. They’re going to have to declare for bankruptcy. It’s a matter of when, not if they do it. After Angelo was gone, they said ‘hey we’re not paying people Angelo money anymore, we’re not paying people Howard money, we’re not paying people Anthony Gargano money.’ (It was) ‘this is what we’re willing to offer you.”
Marks was quite forthright in his comments, which seems to have resulted in his removal from his weekend position at CBS Sports Radio. Audacy manages that network under a licensing agreement with Paramount, the network’s owner.
Marks recently launched his own YouTube show and made those claims to Kevin Kinkead of Crossing Broad.
“Almost immediately, I heard from Audacy that they were very unhappy at the corporate level regarding that line and the interview that I did with you,” Marks told Kinkead, as transcribed by InsideRadio. “At the time I was doing the national shifts on the weekend with CBS Sports Radio. I am no longer doing CBS Sports Radio because I was terminated by the company following the interview with you… I wanted to be honest and candid about it. I didn’t rip the company. I wasn’t killing the company. I was very fair and spoke very highly of everybody that worked at WIP, and I wasn’t blaming Audacy (like) it was their fault; I was just talking about the financials of being in the radio business today.”
