Changes at KGO

[gr8oldies]

Another take http://www.allaccess.com/the-letter/archive/24075/as-goes-kgo

 

[TheBigA]

Good article by Perry. One of the comments links an article written by a former KGO staffer, who is obviously very angry. People still don't get it. The reason the previous talk hosts were fired 5 years ago wasn't because of Citadel or Cumulus. The reason these latest people were fired wasn't because of Citadel or Cumulus. It was because of ABC. They owned the station for years, got fat and happy, and didn't want to deal with the reality. When they did, they did the easy thing, which was sell it. They made their problem someone else's problem. That didn't solve the problem. It was still there. So blaming Citadel or Cumulus or radio or debt or anything else ignores the real issue. ABC ran KGO into the ground, and then walked away from it. Anyone who's done that to a car knows there's no easy solution. You can spend lots of money trying to restore the car to its previous glory. But it's what we call a money pit. A big giant hole you pour money in, and all you get at the end is something nice to look at. Is that really what you want?

Look what Jeff Bezos is doing with the Washington Post. He fired a lot of people. He sold the paper's historic headquarters and moved to cheaper digs. And Bezos is a smart guy who understands 21st century media. That's the model to follow, and it's not much nicer than what's happening in radio.

 

[davideduardo]

Good article by Perry. One of the comments links an article written by a former KGO staffer, who is obviously very angry. People still don't get it. The reason the previous talk hosts were fired 5 years ago wasn't because of Citadel or Cumulus. The reason these latest people were fired wasn't because of Citadel or Cumulus. It was because of ABC. They owned the station for years, got fat and happy, and didn't want to deal with the reality.

Yet people continue to blame Cumulus for the failure of KGO, when, in fact, the station was already around 20th or lower when Cumulus bought it. It was already down to about 8th in 25-54 when Citadel bought ABC's stations in 2007.

Here is another comment from the allaccess.com site which supports your point of view:

"The KGO issue with PPM was more than just the detection technology. The issue was that talk listeners wrote in large chunks of the day in their diary entries while the real PPM listening was for shorter intervals with many interruptions. So between the last diary books in 2008 and an average of the first currency PPM books, KGO plummeted from 8th in 25-54 to below #20.

PPM came to San Francisco well before the oft-blamed Citadel deal. KGO, already on a considerable slide in the sales demos, was massacred by the PPM. From the year 2000 when KGO had a number one ranked 5.0 share in 25-54 in the Spring book to mid-2010 when the station averaged 20th in the same demo with around a 2.4 share, the station had been on a decline for a decade. The PPM simply pushed it over the edge of the cliff."

 

[Bongwater]

Been listening to this loop for a few hours and I LOVE IT!! I honestly do.

Bob Marley remixes? Uplifting TED Talks? Cheerful local comments? Superb Speeches? An occasional Top 40 jam? Synthy Dance Pop? Blues? Easy Listening? Classic Rock? Alternative Rock? Computerized Female Announcers?

Damn. Who took the Sanka out of the KGO break room?

Keep it THIS format, including the music on KGO, Cumulus. You're on to something. Don't blow it on the 5th. Please.

 

[TeaPartyDude]

Ron Owens to stay at KGO

http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/KFOG-axes-DJs-future-up-in-the-air-7223598.php

 

[alok]

I felt that this has been a bad April Fools joke all along, the news people are the ones that got it ,it makes you wonder how a company can wipe out a number of peoples jobs and still turn part of the action into a comic show ?

Al

 

[Gregg.]

Well, it was a massacre at KGO. But with a small news staff, the station will still have a mostly local talk schedule. According to SF Gate:

6-10 am .... Armstrong & Getty (from KSTE Sacramento)
10 am-noon .... Ronn Owens
Noon-2 pm .... Ethan Bearman
2-4 pm .... Brian Copeland
4-7 pm .... Chip Franklin
7-10 pm .... Kevin "DreX" Buchar
10pm-6am .... syndicated programming

The word is Owens was told he was moving to KSFO. Then he took another look at his current contract and realized he could decline such a move. But KGO has now framed it as "the listeners demanded Owens stay!"

So is the glass three-quarters empty or one-quarter filled? Cumulus could have gone all, or mostly, syndicated programming around the clock. But it will still have five local hosts each weekday. And while Armstrong & Getty are syndicated, at least they are based only 80 miles away in Sacramento.

It is a shame all those newspeople are out the door. But only NYC has two well-functioning All-News stations. LA no longer has KFWB. Chicago no longer has WMAQ. Cumulus tried to keep its All-News blocks on KGO for several additional years, even though it was competing with KCBS, a 24/7 news station on both the AM and FM dials. So can we say those newspeople at KGO got a few more years of being on the station? Are they SAG-AFTRA? Did they get a few more years to build their union pensions?

I know some are saying AM is dying and KGO is a casualty. But SF still has top rated KCBS and KNBR on the AM dial. (Yes, KCBS is both AM and FM but I suspect 740 AM still gets a good deal of listening. We found out WBBM-AM Chicago still has more listeners than its FM simulcast.) Would KGO have survived if it were on FM? Or has NPR affiliate KQED taken up much of the moderate-to-liberal Talk audience, leaving little for KGO?

(As a side note, I find it interesting that iHeart's 910 KKSF is mostly a Progressive Talk station now, giving up Armstrong & Getty to KGO, and using liberal Stephanie Miller for mornings, joining Alan Colmes, Gil Gross and others on the left side of the spectrum.)

 

[TheBigA]

The word is Owens was told he was moving to KSFO. Then he took another look at his current contract and realized he could decline such a move. But KGO has now framed it as "the listeners demanded Owens stay!"

Tom Taylor reported that Owens himself didn't know, but his attorney did. That's a smart attorney.

Yes all talent at KGO are AFTRA. There usually is some severance in those deals, although it's probably only a month.

 

[johndavis]

I know it's all the rage to harp that PPM has destroyed everything, suits have destroyed everything, consultants have destroyed everything.

Here's where I stand:

1. I can't say for certain that PPM is right or not. The fact that Nielsen has adjusted the system after Voltair came out does make it appear that PPM encoding isn't a friend to the talk format. Yet at the same time I can believe that diary estimates are no more accurate. It makes more sense to me that someone punches in and out of programming either by changing the station or walking towards and away the radio more often than would be estimated if they wrote down how long they thought they listened in a diary. In other words, all ratings methodology have some set of flaws, we have whatever methodology has been accepted as currency in each market, and we all have to accept that they are purely estimates.

2. I believe that even if we had diaries today, if we locked every station in a time warp and did everything the same way as we did 20 years ago, we'd fail. The rest of the world has changed. Media needs to change with it. The things I find entertaining now are different than what I found entertaining 20 years ago. Or 10 years ago. Or 5 years ago. Radio holds up a mirror at its audience. Or at the audience it wants to attract..

I also believe wholeheartedly in what Perry describes in his column as being known as "mom & dad's station." I think back to the CHR that I had grown up listening to. Pop music was going through one of its extreme phases and then basically crashed. There were 2 extremes on the pop chart: you could either go hard rhythmic or you could go soft pop. If you went soft pop, you killed off your teen base. If you went hard rhythmic you killed off your adult base. Whereas today in a pop boom, mothers and daughters agree on a lot of titles and the only thing that delineates CHR from Hot AC is the gold category, the two sides were far apart. Radio makes its money on adults, so the station I grew up with went after the mothers. The mothers weren't listening because they thought of the station as "the one my kids listen to." The kids left because the music was too soft. The 12+ numbers went 10.2 - 2.9 - 2.2. So they blew it up. There weren't too many good options for CHR then, and lots of stations got blown up.

The elephant in the room at most talk stations is that the audience is too gray. Even NPR is having this problem and has been tinkering with its flagship programs for the past 10 years. How many stations are running re-runs of Car Talk? What was the last breakout hit from NPR on air? (Serial doesn't count.) This American Life and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me all have a lot of miles on them. And the age of the audience at your non-sports AM talk station is all 55+, as men under 55 have migrated to sports radio for talk programming, as the heritage news/talk is the station their dad listens to. So this will not be the first heritage news/talk station to get blown up. The only question is what station will be the next.

As for NPR, my problem with them is radio needs to be engaging, and often when I'm in the car I don't have the attention span long enough for them to engage with me. If they can hook me, I can listen for a long time. The problem is they often can only hook me in a couple of times a month. Otherwise I punch in and punch out.

3. Like Perry Michael Simon, I don't profess to know what today's 25-54 year old wants out of a news/talk radio station other than "something different than what they're talking about now." And the answer may end up being they don't have use for a news/talk radio station at all because they're happy with sports radio. But if you're not going to turn in the license you have to try something different.

4. Another parallel: 25 years ago, some oldies stations realized that their audience was greying out of the demo and went hard into the 70's. And the old guys all went nuts because their favorite radio station stopped playing 60's music. And the first couple of stations that did it lost their nerve and backed out of it before phasing the changes back in. More recently, CBS-FM blew itself up to go Jack. Then it "came back" with a much lighter 60's presence and is now almost entirely 70's-80's, not unlike what it played as Jack.

We're all remembering the KGO that we used to listen to, but the KGO that was there last week wasn't that radio station. The lineup will probably be totally different a year from now. But something had to be done. Nobody has the answers on how to fix news/talk, but if you don't try something different you're not going to find what mix of elements work.

 

[TheBigA]

2. I believe that even if we had diaries today, if we locked every station in a time warp and did everything the same way as we did 20 years ago, we'd fail. The rest of the world has changed. Media needs to change with it.

I agree. PPM came about because advertisers were getting more accurate data about customers from other media. Time marches on! People get older, habits change, tastes change, circumstances change, and we all have to change with it, or we die. The fact is that there's nothing we in radio can do that will get people to throw away their smart phones and computers and buy transistors again. That train left the station. Everyone who still thinks that way is living in buggy whip world.

 

[davideduardo]

I know it's all the rage to harp that PPM has destroyed everything, suits have destroyed everything, consultants have destroyed everything.
.

Here are the real facts:

In the decade before Citadel bought the ABC stations, KGO was part of a group based on the old model of 1 AM and 1 FM per market. While in San Francisco they had added a second AM, the operation was operated just the way it had been through its several decades of dominance. In fact, much of the management team that moved the station to the top were still there.

But the #1 in 25-54 of the mid to late 90's was down to an average of 8th when Citadel blundered in.

Before Citadel did much of anything, San Francisco went to being a PPM currency market. And KGO dropped to an average of 20th in 25-54. There had been no change of management.

Simply put, the station's core audience aged out of the sales demos, and then the PPM showed that those "I listened from 9 AM to 3 PM" were really "I listened in little pieces through the 9 AM to 3 PM period, totaling two hours and not 6" (A phenomenon seen by many high TSL and lower cume stations from the diary days saw happen).

So you had the same National Radio Hall of Fame inductee managing the station and the same format. But the format did not age well, as boomers were never replaced by Gen X listeners and management did not have a "fix" to change that fact.

In fact, there are really no cases where even the best management was able to hold off the loss of 25-54's in that particular format. And that may mean that like other faded formats of the past, talk simply reached its expiration date.

Blaming the decline on the local management is disingenuous; they built the station. And blaming consultants, which they did not have, is just untrue.

 

[TheBigA]

Blaming the decline on the local management is disingenuous; they built the station. And blaming consultants, which they did not have, is just untrue.

Unfortunately, this is what talk radio does. Instead of looking at real reasons why things are, they instead turn certain people into enemies. It used to be good for ratings. Now it just causes people to turn the radio off.

In the meantime, something has to be done about this radio station and similar AM stations. Whatever happens, it's not going to be something any of us can turn into a catch phrase. Blaming people or demonizing certain companies won't bring back the past. The future won't look like the past. We already know this. Selling these stations to small local owners won't help. We're never going to buy gas for 30 cents a gallon. The days of buying a brand new car for $600 are gone. And AM stations won't get 20 shares again. That's something you can bet on.

 

[gr8oldies]

WLW was able to "young up" in the early 80s, when Randy Michaels came over from WKRC. This was the station that still simulcast Bob Braun's 50-50 Club from TV for the aging housewives at noon. That was all blown up with hip, young, sometimes offensive talent and it worked. (WLW still holds good ratings, likely demographics are getting to be an issue).
The same person, along with Kevin Metheny, tried to take another old-line station, WGN, and do the same thing 5 years ago, with some of the same people. It failed miserably.
For 20 years, boards like this have been full of ex-jocks telling us that life was Utopia in the Mom and Pop era (most stations were NOT owned by mom and pop, especially in big markets), and hoping that the FCC would reverse itself, or the big companies would go bankrupt and radio would fall into mom and pop hands. Then the digital automation would be thrown away, jocks would be hired, and we'd have those obscure, deep playlists we had in the past (except we didn't!). Even if we could rewind that clock, things wouldn't be the same.

Some people have told me there are broadcasters with money waiting to buy stations whenever the big boys have their fire sale. I'm wondering, then, why markets like Mansfield , Ohio and Somerset, KY haven't already been sold.

The answer for talk radio? Beats me. The transition should have been being made no later than 2000.
It's not lost on me that Kevin Metheny died in his chair trying to save KGO

 

[landtuna]

We're never going to buy gas for 30 cents a gallon.

Adjusted for inflation (currently in the neighborhood of $2.00/gal) that is almost exactly what gas is.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

The same person [Randy Michaels], along with Kevin Metheny, tried to take another old-line station, WGN, and do the same thing 5 years ago, with some of the same people. It failed miserably.

And lest we forget FM News 101 in New York.

 

[gr8oldies]

And lest we forget FM News 101 in New York.

And Chicago

 

[CaliRadioFan]

So in the end, it was pretty much a smoke and mirrors stunt, resulting in a voice-tracked morning show, and a re-shuffled host lineup. I guess with the weekenders being promoted to weekdays, we can look forward to more hours of Purity Products on Sat-Sun. And with the KSFO line-up now remains unchanged, I suspect Cumulus wants to compete with KKSF, whose lineup is local for most of their daypart (9am-7pm). And while not announced, I would think Cumulus goes in-house for KGO's vacant overnight shift with their new third shift kid-on-the-block "Overnight America with Jon Grayson"

 

[davideduardo]

So in the end, it was pretty much a smoke and mirrors stunt, resulting in a voice-tracked morning show,

The morning show is live, not voice tracked.

 

[LKellerIII]

Even if KGO should move to the FM dial (not likely) - it won't matter to me. I will not be listening. Been there, done that. My decade and a half of talk radio listening began about 1982 when I was commuting in an old clunker with a crappy radio that could only bring in KGO and KCBS. It had an FM tuner, but it didn't pull in any stations worth a damn. I was a captive audience, but after a while I found that I liked KGO's offerings, particularly Ronn Owens, and later Pete Wilson, Gene Burns, and a couple of others, including (believe it or not), Quentin Kopp on Sunday nights. But by the mid 90s, I had tired of the whole thing - particularly political talk, which just got me upset in that era of Clinton bashing.

It looks like Talk Radio managed to bypass Gen-Xers, either through the fault of the programmers in radio, or because the GenXers are just too busy listening to NPR, and music on FM. From everything I've read, millennials are not interested either. Unless some smart programmer can really reinvent the Talk Radio format, perhaps it's doomed to go the way of Smooth Jazz and 60s Oldies, once us Baby Boomers kick the bucket. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

 

[landtuna]

Back in the late 60's KGO was on both AM and FM (103.7). I know that frequency has gone through a few formats and owners since but if KGO needed an FM outlet why didn't they stay with the old FM?