• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Ways to revive talk radio in LA market

xkxrx said:
Some interesting ideas, but the author doesn't take into account that the KABC signal no longer has the coverage it did during its heyday.

www.dailynews.com

Talk radio isn’t dead. But there are ways to revive it in Southern California

How should a station improve its chances, asks radio columnist Richard Wagoner.
www.dailynews.com www.dailynews.com
Click to expand...
To be fair, the signal coverage is likely the same as years ago. It's the ability to receive the signal over a growing noise floor that is hurting all MW/AM stations.
 
Kelly A said:
To be fair, the signal coverage is likely the same as years ago. It's the ability to receive the signal over a growing noise floor that is hurting all MW/AM stations.
Click to expand...
And... it never covered well the far extremes of the market such as Santa Clarita, Palmdale, southern Orange County, etc., particularly at night.

The areas it does cover are predominately Black, Hispanic and Asian and not likely to have much commonality in taste. This is obviously an article written by an "old white guy" who does not see the huge ethnic and cultural changes in the area.

Like most late 20's or early 30's allocations, it was intended to serve a much smaller city without suburbs extending out 40 miles or more.
 
Last edited:
You're not going to find out about the future of anything by asking a boomer. Richard Wagoner is the wrong person to write this column, because all he knows is what he has experienced, and none of that matters anymore. You need to ask someone in college what they want to hear on talk radio.

To show you how out of touch he is, he's writing about KABC. The people who own KABC don't care about the station at all. They don't care about how to improve it, and they're certainly not going to take advice from a boomer newspaper writer. So his first mistake is writing about KABC as though it matters. It doesn't. Nobody cares that it invented talk radio, because those people are dead, and that company no longer exists.

If you want to know how to revive talk radio, go to a college campus, and listen to what college kids talk about, and how they interact with each other. That's just step one. If you're unwilling to do step one, you shouldn't write such a useless column. The future won't be like the past.
 
TheBigA said:
If you want to know how to revive talk radio, go to a college campus, and listen to what college kids talk about, and how they interact with each other. That's just step one. If you're unwilling to do step one, you shouldn't write such a useless column. Thee future won't be like the past.
Click to expand...
I'd skip the college campuses (campi?) but instead look for employed people in the 19 to 25 age range, including the large percentage who don't go to college. A survey of what they talk about, what they did on the Internet in the last 24 hours, what kind of electronics device they'd like to buy if they had some extra money...

The future for mass media will include not just college grads. And the market for free mass media will likely be concentrated in what used to be called "the working class" where college as well as paid streaming services are too expensive.
 
DavidEduardo said:
I'd skip the college campuses (campi?) but instead look for employed people in the 19 to 25 age range,
Click to expand...

Or maybe talk to the 20 something currently working in radio. No boomers ever ask their opinion because they're too full of their own importance. I work with a 26 year old sports talk show host. This guy works 7 days a week. He posts video and interacts with listeners, two things no boomer talk show host would ever do. The way to revive talk radio is to place a mandatory retirement age on talk show hosts. Set it around 40. After that, they manage, consult, or own. See how the next generation revives talk radio.
 
TheBigA said:
Richard Wagoner is the wrong person to write this column, because all he knows is what he has experienced, and none of that matters anymore.
Click to expand...

If you go back and read his archived columns, you will quickly see that he has been pretty much out of touch with radio for well over a decade. I have spoken with him and he will not change.

And the continued carriage of his column proves that the L.A. Newspaper Group (parent of the Daily News) wouldn't know what was going on in radio if it bit them.
 
DavidEduardo said:
And the market for free mass media will likely be concentrated in what used to be called "the working class" where college as well as paid streaming services are too expensive.
Click to expand...

You never see a newspaper columnist talk about business plans or how to pay for his great idea. Boomers believe the mythology that if you build it, they will come. We know that's not true because we see it every day. Any column talking about reviving talk radio can't assume that you can run 20 minutes of spots an hour. So if you can't run spots, where does the money come from? Once you know the answer to that, the programming is the easy part.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Hell, they may not do it on FM, either. They have many other options for dissemination.
Click to expand...

You're right, and that's what Wagoner would see if he spent time with them. He mentions Woody and all those existing shows, but he doesn't mention Joe Rogan or those who command massive audiences on TikTok or other social media. His head is so oriented around traditional media that he doesn't know where the real audience is. The reason they're there is because they built their audience from scratch.
 
TheBigA said:
You're right, and that's what Wagoner would see if he spent time with them. He mentions Woody and all those existing shows, but he doesn't mention Joe Rogan or those who command massive audiences on TikTok or other social media. His head is so oriented around traditional media that he doesn't know where the real audience is. The reason they're there is because they built their audience from scratch.
Click to expand...
I'll tell a little story from nearly 60 years ago.

I was in Ecuador, and had the three highest rated station in a market of over 40 total fulltime local stations.

There was no FM. I decided FM would be a good way to link my studios with my AM transmitters and built 3 lower power FMs. I also got a nice Philips console radio-record player.

Gee, the FMs sounded so much better than the AMs they were serving. Maybe I need to have some of those.

This was around 1966, when FM was still struggling in the U.S., so I did not have a real model to emulate. So I built the first independent FM between Costa Rica and Peru. It had a modified instrumental music format with a vocal in the second spot of every three song sets; the vocals were soft ballads and lots of Latin American folk music.

We set a commercial limit of one 20" spot every 10 minutes, or 2 minutes total an hour. No hard jingles, no hard sell.

What I did had no ´precedent, but it did not use the past as a way to model the future. It broke every rule on commercial time, content, and even the band.

When I launched the first of those stations, soon after there was a meeting of our local Ecuadorian equivalent of the National Association of Broadcasters. One member, a competitor, spoke and asked why the association was allowing a member to "create" a new band when one was not needed and where doing this would confuse listeners. They got applause from many of the other broadcasters.

I said, "Do you have a spare S/ 500,000? I'm spending that on each station and you are welcome to do the same. The band is empty." No response.

All the veteran radio people, including a lot of my staff, said that it would not work. They thought that the FM was my eccentric hobby and that I was wasting time. By the end of the first year, the station was profitable. By the end of the second one, it had a higher operating margin than any of my AMs.

A long story, but it brings me to the question of "what innovative approach to new media are existing radio broadcasters taking?" (It's so quiet I can hear the crickets chirping...)
 
Last edited:
TheBigA said:
You're right, and that's what Wagoner would see if he spent time with them. He mentions Woody and all those existing shows, but he doesn't mention Joe Rogan or those who command massive audiences on TikTok or other social media. His head is so oriented around traditional media that he doesn't know where the real audience is. The reason they're there is because they built their audience from scratch.
Click to expand...
Joe Rogan was already a celebrity though. He was on NewsRadio, UFC, Fear Factor, etc. and brought some of those audiences with him as well as added new listeners.
 
Author has a very astute observation about only one-at-a-time-to-this-market rule for successful talk formatted stations.

Well anyway, we have one now! Done! Revived- sort of.

Here are some ideas to bring in the Ad gravy money to 790 for maybe its last lap around the track:

Israeli-Iranian Music, with an E-speaking host of course. This is L.A., U.S.A., you know.

Persians and Armenians Cooking together- in English

The Winker’s Moldovan folk time music festival

Norteño (Old-time Mexican-Eastern Euro songs) Host Sonny Melenzez, even Gary Owens would have made that entertaining. I’d listen.

solid news department- definitely have to have.

The current 790 broadcasting model (and most of its content) is a JOKE as far as the public is concerned. But as you have all been noting, AM doesn't matter anymore as an advertiser supported platform? I wonder if people in the key money demos of today even care about radio's one-to-many (common experience) offering. I suspect not.
 
BLA said:
Author has a very astute observation about only one-at-a-time-to-this-market rule for successful talk formatted stations.

Well anyway, we have one now! Done! Revived- sort of.

Here are some ideas to bring in the Ad gravy money to 790 for maybe its last lap around the track:

Israeli-Iranian Music, with an E-speaking host of course. This is L.A., U.S.A., you know.

Persians and Armenians Cooking together- in English

The Winker’s Moldovan folk time music festival

Norteño (Old-time Mexican-Eastern Euro songs) Host Sonny Melenzez, even Gary Owens would have made that entertaining. I’d listen.

solid news department- definitely have to have.

The current 790 broadcasting model (and most of its content) is a JOKE as far as the public is concerned. But as you have all been noting, AM doesn't matter anymore as an advertiser supported platform? I wonder if people in the key money demos of today even care about radio's one-to-many (common experience) offering. I suspect not.
Click to expand...
That is a lot of original content you want to create for a very small AM station with limited usable signal. And you want them to have a full news department to go along with the Persian/Armenian cooking shows? How about two traffic helicopters too?
 
ChannelFlipper said:
That is a lot of original content you want to create for a very small AM station with limited usable signal. And you want them to have a full news department to go along with the Persian/Armenian cooking shows? How about two traffic helicopters too?
Click to expand...

Methinks BLA was never advised what the /s tag means on a message board, else he might have properly applied it to his post. :p
 
K.M. Richards said:
One thing I am certain of (which Mr. Wagoner is ignorant of, sadly) is that the next generation won't be doing it on AM.

Hell, they may not do it on FM, either. They have many other options for dissemination.
Click to expand...
One could argue that Millennials and Zoomers are already 'doing it', online, via YT and other podcasts, as well as (very short form) on TikTok.
 
TheBigA said:
This is why no one ever acts on these proposals. They're all wonderful in the theoretical. A lot less so in the practical.
Click to expand...
Sorry 'yall but they are facetious comments not wonderful, just tongue-in cheek ideas with a sprinkling of gestalt. No need for special sarcasm markers, not real proposals and yet illustrative of the problems Daily News publishes about that seem unsolvable. Also, Boombox4 got it right about podcasts and Millennials.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom