TFM latest Bauer cost-cutting casualty

Just over a month after Magic 1170’s breakfast show was ditched it has been revealed today its sister station TFM is also to undergo severe cut-backs which will see the station’s HQ in Teesside closed.

The changes will see TFM merged with Tyneside broadcaster Metro Radio.

Regional paper The Northern Echo reports that Bauer Media are once more on a cost-cutting exercise which will see most TFM staff made redundant and the Thornaby based production centre close.

The uniting of Metro Radio, which launched in 1974, and TFM, which began in 1975 as Radio Tees, will only leave separate local news bulletins on each station.

A radio insider, who did not want to be named told the newspaper that ‘staff had been left devastated when they turned up to work to hear the shock announcement by parent company.’

In March Magic 1170 saw its last remaining programme for Teesside air when the breakfast show was axed – with again programming expanded from the Tyneside based Magic 1152, which shares the same studio complex in Newcastle as Metro Radio.

It isn’t the first time TFM and Metro FM, as was, have shared programming – however the venture in the late 1980s proved unsuccessful. Radio regulator Ofcom requires TFM to produce seven hours a day of Teesside specific programming, they will be giving their view on the situation shortly reports suggest.

A tribute to site to the original Radio Tees is online here