Staff Layoffs Reported At Connoisseur Stations

Connoisseur Media laid off close to 70 employees across its radio stations in a companywide round of cuts that began Tuesday, according to staff who were let go. More specific details are not available.

Eddie Volkman

Chicago radio veteran Eddie Volkman reportedly among the lay-offs. Volkman had been hosting mornings on suburban Joliet classic hits station The 9-6-7 WSSR and spent the past decade across the cluster that now includes Connoisseur’s Chicago-area stations. 

He is best known for co-hosting mornings at B96 WBBM-FM from 1986 to 1994 and again from 1997 to 2008. “Today was my last day with the company, and I am another unfortunate casualty of the radio industry,” Volkman wrote. “Luckily, I really wasn’t doing it for the money, but rather for my love of the radio and the business.” 

Connoisseur, based in Westport, Connecticut, and led by founder and CEO Jeff Warshaw, grew sharply after completing its acquisition of Alpha Media in September 2025. The combined company has operated more than 200 stations in dozens of markets. Since the deal closed, Connoisseur has sold or shuttered stations in smaller markets, including clusters in Iowa, while shifting resources toward larger markets such as the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The company has not publicly detailed the scope of Tuesday’s cuts or named all of the stations involved. 

Jeff Warshaw

When the Alpha deal closed last year, Warshaw said Connoisseur planned to add staff rather than cut its way to growth. The latest reductions come as other major radio groups, including iHeartMedia, Audacy and Cumulus, have also trimmed on-air and programming jobs this year.

When Connoisseur closed on Alpha in September 2025, Jeff Warshaw framed the deal as a scale play for a local operator. Connoisseur jumped from 11 stations to more than 200 across 47 markets and into the top 10 U.S. radio groups. The pitch: large local sales staffs, live talent, events, community presence, and digital marketing layered on top of radio. He explicitly rejected the iHeart-style “cut your way to prosperity” model and said the company would add people, not strip them.

Alpha was attractive because it already had strong positions in midsize markets Connoisseur liked—Portland, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, San Jose, Louisville, Palm Springs—but had been starved of investment after bankruptcy and later staff cuts. Warshaw’s bet was that Connoisseur’s operating style could improve stations Alpha could not fund.

The public philosophy is localism and staffing. The portfolio math pulls the other way.Alpha arrived with many tiny markets—Warshaw cited towns as small as 7,000 people—and those stations cannot support “huge sales staffs” and live lineups. He has said Connoisseur could not keep subsidizing operations that jeopardize the whole company. That is why the small-market purge is explicit and unfinished.