New CEO Bob Pittman told analysts on Monday's Q3 conference call that with CFO Tom Casey doing such a good job on the previous calls, Pittman might not be a regular on future calls. But he answered a range of questions, including one from JPMorgan analyst Avi Steiner about last week's personnel cuts in the ranks of medium- and small-market programming staffs.

Pittman's answer: "What John Hogan has done with his team, and taken quite a bit of thought in it, is really looking at our smaller markets that don’t have an economic structure that allows them to do the same quality of programming as the big markets. And [they] looked at how we can use the assets of the big markets to help the small markets, therefore, obviously, giving an advantage to a Clear Channel station, because we have more of the big markets we can call upon.” Pittman goes on to say that “Any company started before the Internet is almost by definition outmoded in terms of its operational structure.” So what Clear Channel did was "take a very hard look at the smaller markets, try and figure out, okay, it’s 2011, we have all of the assets of Clear Channel, how can we make the products better? That was really the driving force. The horrible thing is that it means that some people lose their jobs...By the way, at the same time, we’re adding jobs in National Programming Platforms, strategic partnerships and digital. It is a reallocation of resources and a different way of doing business. Realizing and understanding and acknowledging that the world is different in 2011, it is unfortunate about the layoffs, but the good side is that after this reorganization, the business will be in great shape to operate better, to improve the quality of their performance, therefore attracting more listeners and generating more revenue.” Pittman insists that “It was not about cost-savings.”