Mega Corps and Radio

[Shredder]

So, here's a set of questinos

Who wakes up one morning and thinks "I'm going to buy as many stations as I can and see what happens"
Who wakes up the next morning, see's that maybe doing that wasn't such a great idea, and thinks "I'm going to do the same thing".....


So, what brought on the onset of mega 'block' heads like Clear Channel and Cumulus? Where the Bottom line is the only thing that matters....and so long as the company owner gets rich, who cares what happens to the stations, or the employees in the long run?

When did it happen that just being a regular radio station, owned by an average joe become a bad thing? was it the onset of digital media? Internet Radio? You'd think just the opposite would be true. Now that ANYONE can listen anywhere in the world, including listeners who'd love to hear you in their new home, stations would be come a bit more competitive. and, if you can't cut it, you fold up just like a normal business.

Now it seems folks don't want to go out of business....now the new trend seems to be 'get bought out'.

So, are these mega corps where the bottom line is the only thing that matters.......a good thing, or a bad thing for today's modern world?

 

[TheBigA]

Well, you definitely asked a lot of questions.

The simple answer to your "when did it happen" question is the day radio was invented. From the very beginning, radio owners wanted to broaden their reach. That's what led to the establishment of radio networks in 1926. As I've said many times in these forums, if the ownership laws hadn't been loosened, we simply would have seem an expansion in network and syndicated radio. It would have been cheaper and easier than buying stations. It's all a natural evolution.

Is it a good thing? Depends on your POV. But it didn't start yesterday, and if you look around, it's pretty much the way every industry works. Car companies, beer companies, record companies, etc. I know some people in Oklahoma who wonder why the US didn't stick with the original 13 colonies. If they had, those people would now be living further east.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

So, here's a set of questinos

So, what brought on the onset of mega 'block' heads like Clear Channel and Cumulus? Where the Bottom line is the only thing that matters....and so long as the company owner gets rich, who cares what happens to the stations, or the employees in the long run?

Are you keeping up with what is going on in the world of business today? Because Mitt Romney ran for president, (and some other offices... like governor of Massachusetts) we got a glimpse inside the life of a man who otherwise might have gone un-noticed by most people. In some ways there are hundreds of thousands of Mitt Romneys out there today. People who get an education that ends up bestowing an MBA degree... and education that teaches you to analyze how the economy works, analyze how customers function, etc. That kind of disciplined thinking plus the disciplines brought to us by the folks who helped create "Toyota Quality Management" which now has several names in the business world and was the product of people like Demming and Womack and others, have revolutionized all forms of business.

Whether you buy a burger in a fast food place, an iPod at the Apple store in the mall, or gas-up your car at Quik-Trip.... You can say they are all BLOCK HEADS... or you can simply say they are business people who understand things, facts, trends in business the some of us and our fathers never understood.

You are disgruntled about radio. In some ways, I am, also. But when I go into the auto-parts store to buy a thermostat for my vehicle and the clerk selling it to me hasn't a clue how it works, I miss the old days when the counter clerk was an experience guy who just got too old to crawl under cars all day long.I miss the days when the person selling me tomato plants to put in my garden could reach under the counter and pull out his personal journal and tell you what day he decided was warm enough to set tomato plants each year for the past 20 years.

No, we don't retail that way any more, and sadly, we don't "radio" that way any more.

I suspect there might be a few people sitting in an office somewhere in the kingdom of Clear Channel muttering about the BLOCK HEADS running crummy little getting-nothing-done radio stations that are making the stations CC operates harder to filter out on the receivers of a lot of people.

For better or worse, we don't live in 1955 any more.

 

[TheBigA]

Hey Goat! Welcome back! I've been hibernating for the last three months, and just woke up!

I found the old style auto part store service at a chain: O'Reilly's Auto Parts.

But yes, it's all chain stores now, from car parts to hardware to barbers to burritos. Don't blame that on radio.

 

[landtuna]

But when I go into the auto-parts store to buy a thermostat for my vehicle and the clerk selling it to me hasn't a clue how it works, I miss the old days when the counter clerk was an experience guy who just got too old to crawl under cars all day long.I miss the days when the person selling me tomato plants to put in my garden could reach under the counter and pull out his personal journal and tell you what day he decided was warm enough to set tomato plants each year for the past 20 years.

I live in a metro area of 3+ million people and still have no trouble finding knowledgeable retailers be it NAPA Auto Parts or the guy at the local nursery who knows all about plants and trees. It is somewhat true you have to look for them as they will not likely be found at Walmart, Target or the average chain store. I consider part of the goods purchase price to include the knowledge these people have and gladly pay a bit more to get it.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

20 years ago the economy was soft for a while and I found myself "on the beach". What was then a young and struggling Best Buy came to our market so I jumped in. A number of my coworkers were like me: A bit more mature than some of our co-workers, and offering so "real world" experience. We helped establish Best Buy in our market with a service image / expertise image that the company scheme could not always keep alive and time went forward.

I will have to say that at my local Lowe's I find some great advice and expertise hiding among the ranks.

Land Tuna: The odds of finding good talent in a chain store are increased when you live in an area that is popular for retirement folks to move in. I am north of Atlanta where the ups-and-downs of Appalachia begin and some of the folks with expertise came here in anticipation of it becoming their retirement home... and brought some skills to the market place that might have remained outside of retail had they remained in their original habitat. I think Phoenix also benefits/suffers from this phenomena does it not?

But the chain store is here to stay in retail. And in radio as well.

 

[Shredder]

For better or worse, we don't live in 1955 any more.

The main problem I have with mega radio corps is as follows
Syndication : " While it's nice to have one radio show found in all the markets, just like a TV station, it looses the local flair you've come to expect
Voice Tracking: When budget cuts come in, the live DJ gets the boot, and they have someone do some pre recorded lines to fill in space.
Budget Cuts: When you take on one bad investment after another, a shows budget is the first thing to go, to help pay for the CEO's third vacation home.
On air talent gets even grumpier at not being able to do the things they used to do before the station got bought out by a mega monster.

The other thing I've found about big radio corps is they like to join things together, loosing the stations individuality. Case in point, PLJ was advertising a football party. Turns out, so where all the 5 or so other stations under the Cumulus banner. Nash, WABC, and one or two others. you could tell the PLJ guys wheren't too happy about it. A few years ago, it woudl have been a solo PLJ event.

I just think the cons out way the pros of these big corporations coming into fold. I think it woudl be better for stations to just go out of business than get gobbled up.

 

[TheBigA]

In my view, you're making a lot of generalizations about radio companies, and it's been my experience that each one does things differently.

Syndication : " While it's nice to have one radio show found in all the markets, just like a TV station, it looses the local flair you've come to expect

I think the concept of "local flair" is over-stated. Everyone brings their influences to whatever they do. Ryan Seacrest brings his local flair from Atlanta, where he was born and raised. He found that it was accepted when he moved to LA. And now he's finding an audience in what he does nationally.

What some call "local flair," others might see as hokey and small time. At some point, radio needs to get out of the minor leagues of entertainment. That takes money and power. The small time local host in Missoula may be a star there, but he's no George Clooney or Beyoncé. The listeners expect top name entertainment from their media, and local radio simply doesn't have the resources that TV, satellite, cable, and everything else has.

The other thing to understand is that advertisers want to reach large audiences. That's the name of their game. They will buy advertising on stations and platforms that deliver the big numbers. That's why Cumulus combined their NY stations into one cluster. If you have local flair, but are #9 in your market, you're not going to attract a lot of advertising. No advertising translates to no budget for staff. So it all works together. The only way to pay for staff is to deliver large numbers to advertisers. And a single station can't compete with the national platforms in other media. So if you restrict radio to operate as it did 40 years ago, you're putting it at a competitive disadvantage with all other non-restricted media.

As far as grumpy employees, they're all welcome to work for the smaller local guys, or non-commercial radio. Lots of non-corporate options out there, and I've worked in all of them. They'll take pay cuts to do it, and they still won't do glamorous things. However, if they stay with the big company, they might get considered for a job doing one of those national shows. It may require them to move to another place, but it'll be upward mobility, more money, and better career opportunities for their future. Or they can stay in Hooterville and do a remote at the local hardware store. Which would you rather do?

Even New York City has small locally-owned and operated radio stations. Most of them are on the AM dial, and most don't have big audiences. But if you want local flair, there's lots of it there, combined with a lot of amateurish programming, at least when compared to the big guys. Others are in the non-commercial spectrum. You don't have to listen to corporate radio if it's too slick for your taste. You can subscribe to satellite, but it's also national with centralized hosts. Pandora or Spotify? No hosts at all.

Look...the media world has changed drastically in the last 40 years. Not all of it has to do with ownership. Radio has to keep up with those changes, and that may mean some of the things you used to like will be going away. Welcome to the real world. At one time, we didn't have the internet or computers either. By the way, don't blame me for any of it. I'm just giving you the weather forecast.

 

[Small Market Guy]

Radio is a business. It's not a jobs program for out of work DJs. Once you realize that, you'll find peace.

 

[Art Landing]

No, we don't need a jobs program for out of work DJs. But eight minutes of commercials on a station run by a few engineers mionitoring canned feeds from whereever isn't what radio should be either. What about true "broadcasting in the public interest?"

I'm not talking NPR for the elites. I mean real news coverage of local communities on local issues and events; dealing with regional issues by professionals who care because they live in rthe area, are being paid locally and expet to be there for the next twenty years? There's a former CC owned station in Santa Clarita, CA, that features local hosts and NO syndicated feeds from anywhere, run in conjunction with the local paper.

I know its a dream, but there are some who manage to achieve it.

 

[TheBigA]

There's a former CC owned station in Santa Clarita, CA, that features local hosts and NO syndicated feeds from anywhere, run in conjunction with the local paper.

That's a perfect example. It used to be a lot of radio stations were owned by local newspapers. Then in the late 1970s, the FCC passed a law forbidding it. Worst law ever passed. Every year, they reconsider the decision, and they keep refusing to repeal that rule. Real news coverage ended the day newspapers were forbidden to own radio. The few papers that have received waivers are among the best run radio stations in the country. All local programming, no syndication, and lots of local news. But if you want to know why it doesn't happen in more places...that's why.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

I'm not talking NPR for the elites. I mean real news coverage of local communities on local issues and events; dealing with regional issues by professionals who care because they live in rthe area, are being paid locally and expet to be there for the next twenty years

I'm not sure I reading that phrase the same way you intended it!

Anyone who wants to do the kind of localized, "home cooked" radio you and Shredder are writing about, has to look upon NPR as the yardstick for measuring what you do. Have you noticed that the really great NPR stations are doing at the local level and extension of what NPR does at the natinal level, and it is very local, very service oriented, the kind of programming product any red-blooded crazy-about-radio person describes in discussions like this.

The sooner today's radio enthusiasts learn tyo avoid the "hatred of NPR" syndrome, the sooner they will expand their vision of what ingredients it takes to make their kind of radio.

Atlanta, GA is not exactly some back-woods village made up of left-over hippies... but go on line sometime and listen to John Lemly's "City Cafe" from Noon until 1 P.M. each weekday on WABE. Do it for an entire week. It might get you off of the "NPR is only for elites" thinking.

 

[Small Market Guy]

No, we don't need a jobs program for out of work DJs. But eight minutes of commercials on a station run by a few engineers mionitoring canned feeds from whereever isn't what radio should be either. What about true "broadcasting in the public interest?"

The "public interest" is what the public wants. Not what you think is in their best interest. The public doesn't care about the same things us radio geeks care about, and fully staffed stations with local news departments and live jocks COST MONEY. Money that just isn't there anymore.

If you're lucky, and I know something about this first hand, you'll get a local morning show and the rest of the day on the bird. If that morning show is good enough, it can support the station the rest of the day. That's the best you can hope for these days. Sure, there are exceptions, but that's exactly what they are. Exceptions.

As for the evil mega corps, they kept hundreds if not thousands of stations on the air that would probably be dark right now. They may not be broadcasting what you want, but they're still broadcasting. That's more "public interest" than dead air.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

The "public interest" is what the public wants. Not what you think is in their best interest. The public doesn't care about the same things us radio geeks care about, and fully staffed stations with local news departments and live jocks COST MONEY. Money that just isn't there anymore.

For the sake of discussion, let me challenge what I quoted-back above. (Actually, I agree with much of what you say, but quarrel with you on this one point.)

In "Government Speak".... The public interest is NOT what the public wants. In the language of government, "In the public Interest" refers to 'what is good for society'. In the hay-day of radio, in the era we got a first national public policy on broadcasting (1934?) the nation was flat on it's back with The Great Depression.

It was In the Public Interest that broadcasters pollinate the public with a positive attitude, with social awareness of what was going on around the, with tips on how to survive the tough times. What the public was interested in be damned. In the original concepts, it was the duty of broadcasters to play the role of PARENT and help raise a bunch of children (citizens) who didn't know what made civilization work.

I was born in the late days of the Great Depression and I observed my parents participating in some of the self-help educational and training programs of the era, and the attitude of the Congress in that era: It is the job of the broadcast industry to make these programs popular and make them work.

We don't, as a nation, have that same attitude today. We could move over to some forum topic where politics would be the appropriate topic and we could argue all day long about the role of government TODAY and the role of BROADCASTERS in the society of today.

We have some hold-over language. It NEVER meant that broadcasters were supposed to do programs that the public found interesting. In its early forms, the idea was that broadcasters can do programming that is interesting to the listeners so the broadcasters can survive, and so the listeners will be there with the radio on when the broadcaster went into "nanny-mode" and indoctrinated the populace with those issues that were In The Public Interest.

If the government today thinks that original interpretation should still stand, then the government needs to mandate that the Internet, the movie industry, the podcasting industry, the blogosphere, and the newspaper industry all also have obligations to play "nanny" and function In The Public Interest.

Again, I am not arguing that today we should hold broadcasters to the ideals of 1934.... but that our society should have some robust discussion about what forces we expect will take on the job of helping our society, our country have some cohesive thinking.

Come to think of it: The best example we have today of a group of people who have turned from Functioning in the Public Interest to toward the concept of Functioning in the mode of what the public finds interesting..... would be our legislators!!!!

 

[TheBigA]

Come to think of it: The best example we have today of a group of people who have turned from Functioning in the Public Interest to toward the concept of Functioning in the mode of what the public finds interesting..... would be our legislators!!!!

Exactly. Want to know what's wrong with radio owners? The same thing that's wrong with just about everyone else. Why are radio companies all about money? Because that's all the FCC cares about too. I found it interesting in reading about the new federal budget that the FCC appropriation this year was a NET ZERO, which means the agency has been given its appropriation, but must pay it all back in fees and fines it will collect from licensees, as well as auctioning of spectrum. That tells you all you need to know about the public interest. It's all about money.

 

[Small Market Guy]

Exactly. Want to know what's wrong with radio owners? The same thing that's wrong with just about everyone else. Why are radio companies all about money? Because that's all the FCC cares about too. I found it interesting in reading about the new federal budget that the FCC appropriation this year was a NET ZERO, which means the agency has been given its appropriation, but must pay it all back in fees and fines it will collect from licensees, as well as auctioning of spectrum. That tells you all you need to know about the public interest. It's all about money.

God forbid the people who run radio stations make a buck.

 

[Groove1670]

Voice tracking is not a new concept. It has been going on since tape automation systems 0f the 70's. It is a great tool for small market stations that can't afford hiring a full time staff.

 

[Shredder]

God forbid the people who run radio stations make a buck.

I don't mind the people making a buck off of it. I just think that when you have these big money oriented/bottom line companies running things, sucking shows budgets... it also sucks the creativity and fun the show used to have under more normal ownership. At least if they went out of business, they wouldn't be living on as a shadow of their former self

What's the point of having a station these days, if all you're ever going to do is run a show where there's about 10 minutes of commercials, another 10 minutes of songs you can hear anywhere on the dial, or download within seconds on your computer, and a local DJ that pops in for about a minute of updates? Then add a local traffic person that does a report so short, the tag is longer, and rinse and repeat the cycle? That's not so much programing a station, as it is having something that offices can leave on as background noise so they can get through the day.

if that's all radio is going to be come, just hang up the broadcast mic, cause the fun of radio really is dead. at least it is for me.

 

[TheBigA]

I don't mind the people making a buck off of it. I just think that when you have these big money oriented/bottom line companies running things, sucking shows budgets... it also sucks the creativity and fun the show used to have under more normal ownership.

I've been doing this a long time, and I never had a show budget. I was taught that you don't need money to do a great show. You need imagination, creativity, and the willingness to put the time in. Maybe that's what's missing.

 

[Small Market Guy]

just hang up the broadcast mic, cause the fun of radio really is dead. at least it is for me.

Radio isn't made to be fun for you. It's made to make money.