Of the 3 IHEART owned stations in Boston, Morgan White's 3 hour Saturday evening program was the lone live and local general interest talk program. I enjoyed tuning in to hear a TV personality from days gone by or a local author about Boston history. But when one of those financial planners wants to buy an hour of time to lure seniors into their office no problem Saturday's from 9:00pm to 10:00pm is available. We will just reduce the Morgan White Show to a 2 hour program. The Navigating Retirement infomercial will be far more interesting to our listeners.
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Morgan White loses an hour.
- Thread starter vmorrison99
- Start date
If the financial planner show pays the bills better than that extra hour of Morgan White, then... At the end of the day, radio is a business.
Huh? I count 7 iHeart owned stations in Boston. When did they sell 4?
The infomercial pays Morgan's salary. Because no advertiser is looking to buy time in his show.
Tyocal brainless respponse.
Why don't you go sell insurance?
To repeat what continues to be said, radio is a business. The business of radio is selling advertising to generate income. If WBZ could sell the additional two hours and make more money than they make with Mr. White’s show, then they should. Saturday night from 9-midnight is a non essential time period.
I'm pretty sure this decision was not made based on what was best for the listeners.
If there was another way to pay for the most expensive format in radio, they'd rather do that. But that option doesn't exist.
They're running infomercials in fringe time, which is what this is, so they don't have to run them at times when people listen.
This is not an iHeart thing, this is common among other radio owners in other cities.
OK how can I say this again for the umpteenth time
Radio is in the business of selling advertising
the programming is what they use as filler to keep you listening until the next set of spots play, or in this case a long form commercial colloquially known as an Infomercial.
Outside of some low level managers over in Medford, nobody at IHrt has ever heard of Morgan, nor do they care.
Has anyone ever heard his show being promoted on the station?
Do you think the IHrt sales force at the local or national level is going out and actively selling his show?
I doubt it.
Frankly, Morgan checks an important box on the EEO forms.
Who the bleep are Mac & Gu?
Radio is in the business of selling advertising
the programming is what they use as filler to keep you listening until the next set of spots play, or in this case a long form commercial colloquially known as an Infomercial.
Outside of some low level managers over in Medford, nobody at IHrt has ever heard of Morgan, nor do they care.
Has anyone ever heard his show being promoted on the station?
Do you think the IHrt sales force at the local or national level is going out and actively selling his show?
I doubt it.
Frankly, Morgan checks an important box on the EEO forms.
Who the bleep are Mac & Gu?
Ooooh, the race card has been played! Can't deny the truth, though. Under Westinghouse, Lovell Dyett and Jimmy Myers were weekend staples on WBZ for years. I do remember promos for Dyett's show, however.
Jimmy Myers was his own worst enemy, but I digress.
But lets go back to 2009, the economy has tanked, Wyoming Blasting & Zoning is slashing costs, LaVellie gets beached in favor of syndication, in under a month he is back.
But Lovell Dyet, a 37 year veteran of the station at the time who was also sent packing gets the call to come back to the big time, not in his previous slot, but a pre recorded half hour at 0430 on Sunday morning......
From The Boston Herald
"Dyett, 73, who had been at BZ for 37 years, hosted a Saturday night show that has been replaced with revenue-generating, paid programming. He returns to the station with a Sunday morning public affairs program. The half-hour show will pre-recorded and air at 4:30 a.m."
But lets go back to 2009, the economy has tanked, Wyoming Blasting & Zoning is slashing costs, LaVellie gets beached in favor of syndication, in under a month he is back.
But Lovell Dyet, a 37 year veteran of the station at the time who was also sent packing gets the call to come back to the big time, not in his previous slot, but a pre recorded half hour at 0430 on Sunday morning......
From The Boston Herald
"Dyett, 73, who had been at BZ for 37 years, hosted a Saturday night show that has been replaced with revenue-generating, paid programming. He returns to the station with a Sunday morning public affairs program. The half-hour show will pre-recorded and air at 4:30 a.m."
Evidently the OP is not aware of the existence of frequency modulation.
I should have been more specific I should have wrote the 3 stations that program talk. The infomercial that now runs from 9 to 10 adds to the bottom line but it doesn't pay White's salary. Do you really believe that IHEART needed to sell another hour to afford to pay him. How much do you think White makes?
Not really. Do you really believe advertisers are lining up to buy spots in his show?
iHeart has access to lots of other things they could run in this spot, including this one:
Keep Hope Alive Radio with Santita Jackson - A Voice For The Community
Don't miss out on the latest from Keep Hope Alive Radio with Santita Jackson, A Voice For The Community
But they choose to stay local.
Its seems the off hours (weekend evenings, overnights, etc.) were probably never great times for spot sales but the industry tried to keep decent content in those slots anyway. A good overnight show meant the radio would be tuned to the station for morning drive, etc.
By filling all those slots with garbage the industry is basically trading away the long term for the short term. The younger generation (like myself at one time) who got hooked on late night talk shows and good weekend/overnight music oriented shows will not find anything of interest on radio and stay on Youtube, Spotify, etc. The people running these companies will have long retired and cashed out so it works for them.
By filling all those slots with garbage the industry is basically trading away the long term for the short term. The younger generation (like myself at one time) who got hooked on late night talk shows and good weekend/overnight music oriented shows will not find anything of interest on radio and stay on Youtube, Spotify, etc. The people running these companies will have long retired and cashed out so it works for them.
And the people who once only knew AM will have passed on. When you look at the demographics for these three AMs, it becomes a very stark reminder that time marches on. And it's not just because of "garbage" programming. The demos for the all-news and news/talk formats are not very good. Thus the need to run infomercials. There is a direct relationship between the audience demos and the quality of the spots. You don't hear infomercials on WROR.
If you listen to some of these stations during certain hours, all of the ads are of the feed the pig/brought to you by the forest variety. If you don't know what those are, feel thankful.
There's an assumption that this is strictly a programming problem. If the programming was better, the audience would magically become bigger and younger. That doesn't always happen. They're facing this situation in a lot of places. Radio companies want to continue to keep the lights on, but the advertisers aren't there, and there is no alternate revenue stream. You take what you can get, and in this case, that means infomercials. Infomercials are the last resort, after all other options have been exhausted. They stick them in fringe time so not to alienate the core audience in drive time. But there will come a day.
That may be true - but the audience definitely won't get any bigger/younger when they put this stuff on the air and it will drive the existing "undesirable" audience away too. They either need to take a chance on passing up some revenue now or just guarantee continued decline. This has nothing to do with AM either - it is AM, FM or even the streaming of that content. Just like people will not tune into 1030AM for an infomercial, they also won't listen to it on 107.7FM HD2 or on the iHeart app. The content will be tuned out. If the goal is to migrate to streaming - it will be a fail without decent content.
I'm starting to think the future of entertainment is with small operators posting on Youtube or podcasts. There is some pretty good Youtube content out there now (and not from the paid version - the free version). I probably spend more time watching that than movies/TV/big studio streaming (Netflix, etc.). If you like history or documentary type shows, car shows, music show they have the big corporations beat. While the history channel puts on junk reality shows a guy in the UK has like 8 history channels on Youtube that are all very compelling.
If local radio is not really local or live then there are some good podcasts out there and of course for music numerous options. For news, in my smallish town a guy running around with a camera posting on a website and facebook is actually close to having better news coverage than the local, corporate conglomerate owned newspaper and radio stations. There was a hostage/standoff situation Monday morning with a huge police/swat response which impacted my son who lives next door so I wanted to learn more. Guess who the only one with coverage of it was - it wasn't the paper, not the iHeart owned News/Talk station or even the locally owned radio stations. The guy with the camera had them all beat.
But that's not true. Sticking an infomercial Saturday night at 9PM doesn't hurt the audience for WBZ in drive time. In fact that audience is growing. The OTA audience seeks what it wants wherever that is, if its HD2 or NPR. Just because WBZ runs an infomercial in fringe time doesn't mean the audience completely gives up on OTA. The statistics don't lie.
The problem with digital media is the cost of music royalties. Podcasters are discovering that they can talk on their podcast, but if they play any music, they have to pay full rate for the song, the artist, and the label. That becomes costly, and small operators don't have the resources to cover all of the costs. But sure, maybe Morgan White does a podcast, and you download it and listen to it Saturday night in place of his WBZ show. That just tells the folks at iHeart that they made the right decision to run the infomercial at 9PM.
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