Michaels' replacement will work in Texas
By John Eckberg, jeckberg@enquirer.com
and John Kiesewetter, jkiesewetter@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Clear Channel Communications Inc. Wednesday said its next radio division chief executive will not be based in Covington.
The nation's largest radio operator Monday reassigned Randy Michaels from chief executive of Clear Channel Radio to chief executive of new technologies, a move that mystified some radio observers.
Mr. Michaels will remain in Covington, but the company said its next radio chief will work from corporate headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.
Michaels
"They're just discussing his new role right now," a spokesman for the company said Wednesday. "We don't anticipate Randy Michaels moving from Covington."
Mr. Michaels' new duties remained unclear. He will head an internal corporate think tank of people working in new technologies as well as current technologies, the spokesman said.
Also unclear was the status of about 40 employees working at the radio division's Covington headquarters. "We have no plans to move people from Covington," the spokesman said. "No plans to do anything different there."
Building a company
For more than 25 years, Mr. Michaels has been a force in Cincinnati radio. He came here from Buffalo to program WKRQ-FM (101.9), then owned by Cincinnati's Taft Broadcasting.
Even after becoming head of Clear Channel's 1,200 radio stations, the world's largest radio group, he kept a close ear on Cincinnati stations from Clear Channel's radio headquarters in Covington's Rivercentre complex.
Mr. Michaels, a New York native, left Taft Broadcasting in 1983 to buy rival WLW- AM with several former Taft employees. Three years later, they combined assets with Frank Wood's WEBN-FM (102.7) into Jacor Communications, and built it into a national radio company with founder Terry Jacobs.
Mr. Michaels moved his offices from downtown Cincinnati to Rivercentre in the mid-1990s, as president of Jacor, which then owned WLW-AM, WEBN-FM, WOFX-FM (92.5) and WKRC-AM (550).
From Covington, he orchestrated the explosive growth of Jacor after passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which removed limits on radio ownership. Days after President Clinton signed the bill into law, Mr. Michaels announced that Jacor had acquired Cincinnati-based Citicasters, the former Taft Broadcasting.
In 1999, Texas-based Clear Channel purchased Jacor, to assemble the world's largest radio company, and named Mr. Michaels its top radio executive.
Grasp of details
Darryl Parks, director of AM operations for Clear Channel Cincinnati, Wednesday praised Mr. Michaels for his grasp of radio details. Mr. Parks was working at a failing station a decade ago when he picked up the telephone to Mr. Michaels to ask for a job.
Mr. Michaels asked about the troubled station that Mr. Parks wanted to leave. "I told him it was WIRL in Peoria (Ill.)," Mr. Parks said.
"He says, oh yeah, that's a four-tower array, a straight array and that the towers were in Pekin south of town. I said: Oh, so you used to work here. He said, no, I know something about radio. That's the kind of radio guy Randy Michaels is. That's the kind of detail he knows."
Mr. Michaels embraced new computer technology to conduct Clear Channel groupwide contests where more than 1,000 stations could simultaneously offer the same prize to millions of listeners.
And he has helped revolutionize the radio industry by having DJs record, or "voice track" customized local shows for stations across the country through Clear Channel's computer network.
Mr. Michaels, a sometimes-outrageous radio executive who did not quite mesh with the button-down atmosphere at the headquarters of Clear Channel, has been assigned to head up a division that will only peripherally be associated with the 1,465 radio stations owned or managed by the company .
He did not return telephone calls to his office and Northern Kentucky home.
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