Staff Cuts At Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze

By Chris Ariens 

A year after a round of layoffs, Glenn Beck‘s TheBlaze is cutting once again, this time across offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Columbus, Ohio, where a documentary group had been based. In all, sources tell TVNewser, between 35-45 staffers have been cut.

These layoffs follow what a source calls a “brain drain” of talent over the last year. Betsy Morgan, TheBlaze’s CEO departed the company last summer. Her interim replacement, Kraig Kitchin, left earlier this year. Jonathan Schreiber, the president of Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts brought on Stewart Padveen as president of TheBlaze in January.

The Daily Beast says today’s cuts are meant to “satisfy the requirements of a multi-million dollar bank loan taken out recently to keep Beck’s revenue-challenged enterprise running.” Lloyd Grove reports:

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Ironically, the mass layoffs are occurring shortly after the company hired CNN alumnus Matt Frucci, former executive producer of the cable network’s New Day morning show, to run The Blaze’s television operation in New York—which apparently will no longer exist.

Beck was based in New York when he hosted his HLN and, later, Fox News shows. He left Fox News in 2011 and moved most of his operations to Texas later that year. In 2013 he doubled down on the move and acquired a 72,000-square foot studio in Irving, Texas. He gave us a tour in 2012.

“We’re TheBlaze,” says Beck in his radio promos. “We’re just getting started… we invite you to join us on our journey.”

More: A Medium post has more on the changes, without mentioning staff cuts: “Our Leadership team believes it is essential to our success to have everyone (or nearly everyone) in a single location. So this week we are consolidating our company’s geographically-dispersed operations into a streamlined and centralized model based in TheBlaze’s Irving, Texas studio headquarters. This week’s move is critical to TheBlaze’s transformational journey from a traditional network to a new kind of multi-platform content ecosystem, designed to better cater to our audience’s conservative interests…”

A separate press release announces three new hires, including Frucci, based in Irving.

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