Entercom Communications has unveiled its management team upon the closing of its merger with CBS Radio.
In an internal memo Entercom CEO David Field announced that the following people will hold roles in the combined company:
JD Crowley, EVP/Digital
Mike Dee, President of Sports
Michael Doyle, Regional President and President of Sales Operations
Ruth Gavira, Chief Marketing Officer
Weezie Kramer, Chief Operating Officer
Chris Olivero, EVP/Programming
Pat Paxton, President of Programming
Bob Philips, Chief Revenue Officer
Rich Schmaeling, Chief Financial Officer
Andrew Sutor, SVP/General Counsel
Crowley, Olivero, and Philips will join Entercom from similar roles at CBS Radio. The rest are holdovers from Entercom. Paxton and Olivero will split duties overseeing the company’s programming with Paxton holding oversight over the company’s music brands and Olivero running the News/Talk/Sports stations and both reporting directly to Field.
CBS Radio Chief Operating Officer Scott Herman, who had been expected to hold a high ranking position with Entercom following the merger will exit. Field commented in the memo that, “while we are disappointed that Scott will be moving on to pursue other personal and professional endeavors, we greatly respect his outstanding leadership contributions to the organization. We wish him nothing but the best in the future/”
I am writing to provide you with an update on planning for our approaching merger with CBS Radio. First, I want to express my appreciation to everyone for their patience as we work through this process. We all want to see the deal close as quickly as possible, but these large mergers just take time. I am pleased to report that we are right on schedule and hard at work, making great progress in every area required to complete our merger successfully. Until we close the merger, keep in mind that it remains business as usual and Entercom and CBS remain separate companies.
Today, I have an important update for you on the future leadership team of our new company. There is nothing more important to our future success than the quality of our people. We have spent a great deal of time working to build a ‘best in class’ team composed of highly talented, high performance stars from CBS and Entercom, plus a number of newcomers from outside of the industry who bring new perspectives and capabilities.
As you can well imagine, the process can be hard as oftentimes it requires making very difficult decisions. I can assure you that in every case, we are doing our best to make what we believe are the right decisions for the future of the organization. All of that said, we are incredibly excited about the leadership team that we are building to lead this extraordinary new company forward.
Today, I am delighted to announce many of the leaders on our future senior corporate leadership team once the transaction closes. The list is a work in progress and in the weeks ahead, as planning continues, we will announce additional members of the leadership team, as well as information on a wide range of other important topics as we continue to prepare for this game-changing event.
Here is the current list in alphabetical order:
JD Crowley, EVP/Digital
Mike Dee, President of Sports
Michael Doyle, Regional President and President of Sales Operations
Ruth Gavira, Chief Marketing Officer
Weezie Kramer, Chief Operating Officer
Chris Olivero, EVP/Programming
Pat Paxton, President of Programming
Bob Philips, Chief Revenue Officer
Rich Schmaeling, Chief Financial Officer
Andrew Sutor, SVP/General CounselIn making this announcement, I also want to add a special word of recognition to Scott Herman, who has done a terrific job over so many years in various leadership roles at CBS, culminating in his current position as Chief Operating Officer. While we are disappointed that Scott will be moving on to pursue other personal and professional endeavors, we greatly respect his outstanding leadership contributions to the organization. We wish him nothing but the best in the future.
In addition, I want to share some further information on our programming leadership. Pat Paxton and Chris Olivero, who have done outstanding jobs leading their respective programming teams, will both have key senior leadership roles in the new Company. Pat will serve as our President of Programming and Chris will serve as our EVP of Programming after the transaction closes. Both will report to me and serve on the Company’s senior management committee. While Pat will oversee the music brands and Chris will oversee the news/talk/sports brands, they will be working collaboratively, along with the programming team across the country to ensure that we continue to develop outstanding brands with the best personalities and content for our listeners nationwide. We are committed to making Entercom the clear #1 at delivering outstanding programming, ratings and listener engagement across all of our various platforms.
We are building a company to win and thrive and prosper in the years ahead. Radio is the #1 medium in the U.S. and no company will have a stronger lineup of outstanding local brands, content, personalities, marketing solutions, digital assets, events and other resources. With our combined scale, we will be well positioned to play and compete at a higher level. We can’t wait to get started.