KVOA 4’s new general manager is Bill Shaw, who until August 2008 was president of Superstation WGN, now called WGN America. Shaw was at KVOA last week being introduced to staffers. He is to officially take over his new job Jan. 1, replacing Gary Nielsen who has been the general manager since 2002 and is retiring.

Although Shaw, 54, has spent the last 23 years in New York — WGN’s superstation is headquartered there even though the station is in Chicago — he has a previous connection to KVOA. From 1990 to 1995 he was president of Petry National Television, which sold advertising for KVOA.

Shaw got into the TV advertising business in 1979 working as an account executive for the Petry rep firm in Chicago and then moved with that company to New York in 1986 working his way up the ladder to vice president and then president of Petry National.

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In 1995, Shaw was instrumental in creating Fox Television Sales, a company owned by Petry that sold advertising for Fox stations. He was the president and CEO of that division for six years until Fox decided it was so successful it wanted to bring the advertising sales arm in-house. At the point Shaw was still under contract to Petry, which refused to let him go to Fox. “I was sort of the odd man out,” Shaw said in a 2004 interview with Broadcasting and Cable magazine. 

That’s when the Tribune Co. offered him a job as a vice president for its TV station group. A year later he became president of Superstation WGN. Shaw was among eight high-ranking execs to leave the Tribune Co. last year after it was acquired by financier Sam Zell. Faced with $13 billion debt, the Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December.

 Streak goes on

It looks as if the University of Arizona Wildcats will finish out their football season with three consecutive live ABC TV appearances.

Although not confirmed, ABC is eyeing next weekend’s final home game (Nov. 21) against Oregon. To accommodate the network, kickoff would move to either 1:30 p.m. or 6 p.m. The decision is to be made by today (Nov. 16).

Meanwhile, ABC last week announced it will show the Arizona-Arizona State rivalry game from Tempe at 1:30 p.m. Nov. 28. Before the season even started, ABC scheduled the Arizona-USC game Dec. 5 from Los Angeles, which will be shown at 1:30 p.m. (Tucson time).

All three games will show in Tucson on KGUN 9.

Citadel bankruptcy?

Citadel Broadcasting, which owns KIIM 99.5-FM and four other Tucson radio stations, disclosed in its quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filing this month that it’s seriously considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In the filing the company said it “does not expect to meet its covenant requirements under the Senior Credit and Term Facility as of January 15, 2010. The company is currently in discussions with its lenders regarding this matter, including the possibility of seeking relief through a Chapter 11 filing.”

Citadel said its quarterly revenues were down 14.1 percent, led by a 31.4 percent decline in its network revenues which were down $8 million on the loss of Paul Harvey, who died, and talkshow host Sean Hannity, who defected to Clear Channel.

Besides KIIM, in Tucson Citadel owns K-Hit KHYT 107.5-FM, Bob KSZR 97.5-FM, The Source KCUB 1290-AM and KTUC 1400-AM. It’s also the parent company of the ABC radio networks.

Outdoor squeeze

Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns nearly all of the outdoor billboards in the Tucson region, is getting squeezed by lenders to its parent company, according to the New York Post, which last week reported the lenders are buying up shares of the publicly-traded outdoor company so they can exert more control over cash flow to the parent company, which is privately controlled.

Creditors of $19 billion in debt to the parent company have on multiple occasions rejected efforts to renegotiate. Meanwhile Clear Channel’s debt-to-cash flow ratio on its senior loans has grown to 8.8. At 9.5 it would violate covenant terms, which could force the company to default.

Star turmoil

On the heels of nine employee buyouts on Nov. 6, the Arizona Daily Star laid off another six employees Nov. 10.

As noted here a week ago, the biggest name among the buyouts was Ann Brown, the editorial page editor. Others that might be familiar include Enric Volante, a business reporter; Margo Hernandez, senior reporter; Jim Davis, who was one of the first hired when the Star started doing its own photography in the early 1970s; and Bill Betterton, assistant copy desk director and former sports editor. And a name I recognized even if others might not was Rutha Grigsby, who was the Star’s receptionist but I remember her from when she was part of the effort that produced the newspaper’s own TV Week.

Last week’s layoffs “decimated,” as one person told me, the Star’s library, which in old-time newspaper terminology is called a morgue.

The same day as the layoffs were instituted, the Star announced it was going “local first” on the front page, meaning  local news would take precedence on the front page and world and national news would follow it.

That’s a smart move since local news is an advantage the Star has in Tucson over the multitude of other media outlets where  people can get world and national news. On the other hand, the cynics among us also remember the last time a local newspaper talked about local news first was the Tucson Citizen that did the same thing about a year before it folded.

Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237. Inside Tucson Media appears weekly.