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Michael Graham leaving NewsRadio 106.7

Half a decade ago, the Plan A for DaveFM was to flip it to all-news. Then, that April Cumulus shocked the world and announced that it would flip WYAY, doing a Fox 5 all-newser. Subsequently, DaveFM flipped to Plan B (FM Sports) a little later.

They would never admit it publicly, but the CBS brass saw a huge opening in 2010 for a heavily-traffic and weather focused all-news operation in Atlanta on 92.9. Most of them now regret not getting on it sooner.
 
As for WYAY currently, expect a huge round of layoffs later this summer and a death certificate by this October after the Braves finally finish this miserable season.

106.7 and this Braves season strongly resemble eachother.
 
PlanetEarth said:
I've an excellent plan, Mike. Why don't you buy a station, try all this out, and see how long it is before you end up 1) in court 2) the subject of an EEOC complaint and 3) bankrupt.
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Jeez, a guy just muses a little and gets hammered flat. Pardon me, I'll not venture out into Dreamland again.
 
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PlanetEarth said:
the subject of an EEOC complaint…
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I'm sorry, I don't get the EEOC complaint dig. I can understand the court (because of intellectual property being misappropriated) and bankrupt (because I don't have and never will have that kind of money).

How are federal employment regulations going to come into play?

I guess I'm just too ignorant for this board.
 
Mike_Rafone said:
What I want is an outlet that presents news 24//7. It can be done, and ought to be seriously attempted. Cumulus started out right, but got spooked.
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They gave it a couple years, and didn't see any growth. How long do you want someone to lose money before you realize you're wrong? It's THEIR money an it's their right to decide not to lose it any more.

It WAS seriously attempted, and it failed. There isn't enough audience for it in Atlanta. Deal with it.
 
TheBigA said:
Do you want to do GOOD news radio, or do you just want to do it for the sake of making the meters bounce? You can see how good WYAY has done hiring professional and experienced news staffers from CNN Radio and other places. Maybe hiring inexperienced college kids could do better. But my question to you is: Is that really what you want? They're already doing "salvageable" radio, but it's getting a 1 share. They want better than a 1 share. That costs money. WSB isn't radio on the cheap.
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WSB also has Channel 2 and the AJC to help with the news, especially the local stuff.
 
Mike_Rafone said:
And it is a shame that they have not or won't do it.
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They (Cox) did it when they were LMAing WCNN from Ring Radio or the Dickeys or whoever about, what, 20 years ago, even "borrowing" Tom "The King" Hughes from WGST. I think that was WCNN's last stop before becoming all-sports 680 The Fan.
 
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Every time someone does perceptual research in Atlanta, WSB is perceived as the news station. Whether or not it actually is, isn't germaine to the discussion. As long as it is so perceived, someone trying an all news operation has to overcome that perception, an expensive long - term endeavor.
 
That's very true. I doubt Cumulus did the proper due diligence on that before turning 106.7 into All News. I think when the CNN Radio Network shut down, Cumulus was tempted by their ability to hire talent who needed a job cheaply and saw it as an opportunity to knock WSB out of the #1 spot.

On the first day of the format, Lew Dickey came on and smugly talked about how Cumulus beat other stations who were thinking about All News to the punch.
 
Here's another one: Didn't WSB add FM about the same time WYAY flipped to all news? Wonder if things would be any different had not WSB added FM...
 
trusty said:
Here's another one: Didn't WSB add FM about the same time WYAY flipped to all news? Wonder if things would be any different had not WSB added FM...
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According to Wiki WSB added WSBB-FM in 2010; 106.7 didn't flip to news until 2012.
 
jabba17 said:
According to Wiki WSB added WSBB-FM in 2010; 106.7 didn't flip to news until 2012.
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IMHO Cox would have flipped the FM to all news if 106.7 had been any kind of threat to their numbers. As it was, they weren't so they didn't.
 
It struck me that Cumulus was never understood what it takes to succeed with an all-news format, in terms of investment and patience. It started adding paid programming after about six months, which was also the same time it fired the original news director, and ceased doing promotion. About a year after that, it began the switch-over to talk programming. Interestingly enough, ratings (although modest) were growing slowly but steadily for the all-news format, even after Cumulus stopped promoting the station. Ratings fell after the conversion to talk, and have never regained the loss.
 
On the Dial said:
It struck me that Cumulus was never understood what it takes to succeed with an all-news format, in terms of investment and patience.
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How much of their money do you want them to lose before it's acceptable to you? They hired experienced staff and turned out quality product for two years before they began adding talk. The people they hired to run their news operations, not only in Atlanta but their other markets, certainly had the experience to understand what it takes to succeed in the all-news format. Sometimes it simply doesn't matter. That's the case here.

Even Cox and the Atlanta BOE realize that devoting 100% of their stations to news is a losing proposition. If there was a way for Cox to do better with news only, that's what they would do. Same with WABE.
 
How much of their money do you want them to lose before it's acceptable to you?

I have no idea how much money they lost on all-news. I have no idea how much money they're losing on talk. And I never said what they were doing was acceptable or unacceptable to me. It's their station, and they can do whatever they want with it. I was merely observing that establishing a format that is, for all practical purposes, new to the market, takes a lot of promotion, and more than a year and a half to get established, and they probably weren't prepared for that.
 
On the Dial said:
I was merely observing that establishing a format that is, for all practical purposes, new to the market, takes a lot of promotion, and more than a year and a half to get established, and they probably weren't prepared for that.
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My question simply is how long do you give it? Especially when there are two other stations in the market already doing news as a big part of their format. They waited a lot longer with KGO in San Francisco before adding talk, and the results were basically the same as Atlanta. The heritage stations in the market (KCBS and KQED) were unaffected by the new competitor, and there was nothing another news station added to the market that made it worth switching stations. News isn't a big TSL format. People listen in short bursts, so you're not going to build big numbers by devoting 100% of your time with it. As far as promotion, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. After a year, repeating the same message becomes tiring, don't you think? Unless some big disaster happened that they had first, there was no real success they could build on.
 
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