The huge drop in newspaper and magazine advertising makes the biggest headlines, but other media depend just as heavily on ads to survive. In this environment, FM radio is quietly being hit hard.

The stations we listen to most in Denver still sound much the same, but the turmoil is bubbling up.

It started a year ago when Archer, the Beatles-centric morning DJ on 99.5 The Mountain, was let go for what was described as purely economic reasons. Back in September, fan-loved KCUV (102.3 FM) got its plug pulled, switching the format to Jack FM.

Lately it has started to snowball. Wilks Broadcasting bought three Denver radio stations from CBS Radio in December and made huge changes and firings. Clear Channel layoffs in January led to the shedding of jobs across several of its most successful FM channels, including KBCO and KTCL (including Eric "Boney" Clouse, who was instrumental in the latter station's resurgence as a broadcast powerhouse). Jack FM's entire staff of nine was let go earlier this week.

"How far are we from the bottom? There's just no way of knowing," said Eric Rhoads, CEO of Radio Ink, an industry newsletter. "If I could answer that I'd be a rich man."

The cause? They bought high, then the bottom dropped out.

"The problem in the radio industry is that business has been pretty rocky for the past seven years anyway," Rhoads said. "Bigger corporations like Clear Channel have a tremendous amount of debt because they overpaid for their properties when they were in a buying frenzy."

The same problem has beleaguered much of the radio, newspaper and concert industry: buying new properties at their peak and now finding that they're not worth nearly what was expected. Individual stations, papers and shows can make money and have positive cash flow, but the debt is crushing all three industries.

For the future of radio that means a lack of local content, a fate much of the country already has experienced with voice-tracked shows done out of cities far away. Denver still has live, local DJs and production crews, especially in the morning: Lewis & Floorwax on the Fox, the 'BCO Morning Show with Bret Saunders, Goodman on Channel 93, the Alice Morning Show and plenty more.

Eventually it will be more efficient to carry national programming, the way The Mix carries the Ryan Seacrest show in Denver to fill the hours after the Dom and Jane show in the morning. And Alice Cooper, Little Steven and more are used on other channels.

"The only thing local on most television stations is the nightly news. After that, in most cases, there's no local programming," save for morning shows, Rhoads noted. "The radio business has always been a local business. This economy is forcing it to become very much like the television model was."

Despite the Internet, people still read newspapers, and people still listen to the radio. In hard economies, Rhoads noted, advertising is one of the first things that gets cut. The business model for media depends on ads, period.

Many of the cuts in Denver radio have been behind the scenes, with programmers, promotional people - or, in Jack FM's case, the entire staff. But on-the-air listeners are still hearing familiar voices, even if they may not have as much backup support anymore.

"The people behind the scenes impact the quality of the programming. The loss of those people may mean you don't have someone writing as much or doing as much research," Rhoads said.

That's sometimes more noticeable in other media than radio. Rhoads lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and says the papers he reads "have become crappy little newspapers. They started cutting out sections and features. It became real thin."

In hard economic times, insiders say, listeners gravitate toward the upbeat and fun, looking for escapism the way people flocked to the movies during the Great Depression. Those stations will do well, with a possible downturn in the talk radio that has polarized the nation in recent years.

The bleeding will continue. Clear Channel cut seven percent of its nationwide radio staff, about 2,000 jobs. The cuts came on the day of Barack Obama's inauguration; cynics say that was to have the news lost in the shuffle of the inaugural coverage.

"I suspect this will happen again, unless things really turn around, which I don't think is going to happen anytime soon. This is round A of the whole alphabet," Rhoads said.

He pointed out that Denver billionaire John Malone's Liberty Media had to step in to save Sirius/XM satellite radio from bankruptcy, after years of media reports that satellite would kill terrestrial radio.

Malone took control of the company by providing a loan with a 15 percent interest rate: "a break-your-legs type of interest rate" in this environment, Rhoads said.

"Nobody can get any money so you gotta do what you gotta do."

brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2674

Pink slips

A look at some of the downsizing in radio locally and nationally:

* Clear Channel nationwide: 2,000 layoffs in January

* Clear Channel Denver: About 20 layoffs in January

* KCUV (102.3 FM): 7 layoffs in September

* Jack (105.5 FM): 9 layoffs this week

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