Surely you're not thinking that call letters played any part in driving this decision! Call letters? Really?
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Good Karma To Lease 880; WCBS News Programming To End
- Thread starter lanceventa
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The national five-minute headline summary? Either it moves to WINS or is no longer carried in the NYC market, I suppose.
There you go again. The thing that's killing all those things is the device you're using right now. It's killing everything, including radio, TV, the movies, retail, the music business, and anything else that was once popular because people want what they want for free. You want competition, but radio can't compete against the smartphone.
No I’m wondering if it was just easier to do a clean break now rather than hold on to them.
Sure, especially since those call letters have meant "news" (with occasional sports play-by-play) in New York for decades. Now that there'll apparently be no news at all on 880, it's absolutely the right time to drop the call letters, regardless of the drop-dead date in the old contract. Whether the new letters mean anything or are just a randomly assigned placeholder is irrelevant, as they'll only be mentioned at the top of the hour and listeners will know the station as "ESPN New York."
I could see the uproar if CBS decided to shut down 880 and drop the call letters. At this point they are just legacy calls with no real attachment to its heyday.
This is exactly right.
We cannot, in fact, see this.
I'm not demanding that you produce an income statement.
I am asking you to actually be able to logic your way through your assertations that you keep making, to understand the connection between the available data points, and the income statement.
It appears you have no actual understanding of how to read a financial statement, because you are unable to do so.
With The Mets or Without The Mets.
This is basic coporate finance thinking. With The Mets or Without The Mets. What are the implications of both paths?
Unfortunately, those same people and their salaries are the first thing that gets dumped when the belt-tightening hits. That's the easiest expense to justify getting rid of, and yes, it's cutting off your nose to spite your face. It sucks, but most of the corporate types who make those personnel decisions never actually meet the people they fire.
Everything that's happening now started in the 90s. 80/90, the Telecommunications Act and boatloads of cash meant old, established companies and owners sold out to groups who thought if 1 station makes X, then 6 stations will make 6X! Great, as long as the economy holds out, but recessions, pandemics and everything else means now these same operators have more stations than they need and no one to sell them to. Practically every market in America is seriously over-radioed, but you can't just sell everything at a loss, and with everything they own being mortgaged, you can't just shut down an asset and turn in the license.
As far as the Mets go, I doubt they're a cash cow. Most of these companies use major league sports teams as their loss leader to get ears tuned in, just like the local electronics store sells a 40" TV for $99. They're not making money on it, but once you're in the door, maybe they can upsell you on a washer/dryer set. In my backyard, Audacy and Cumulus are both finding out that big-time sports in Memphis aren't worth the money. Audacy has the Memphis Grizzlies, but anyone who cares about the Griz go to the games, and they don't care about all the fluff on 92.9. Same with Cumulus. They went all-in to get the University of Memphis, and turned 98.9 into "The Roar of Memphis", finally realizing that even UM grads don't stay in Memphis, don't care about Memphis, and Memphis is really an Ole Miss town at heart. Besides, Cumulus couldn't program their way out of a wet Nielsen diary, so there's that.
iHeart is in the midst of mass layoffs, Audacy is still mired in bankruptcy court, Alpha has made so many cuts they have nothing left to bleed out, and Cumulus is, well, Cumulus. The good news in all of this is that GKB believes in Radio enough to lease WCBS 880, and we're always wondering what Cats is going to do with WABC and expansion. Some people are probably happy 880 didn't go religious talk or gospel, because that would be a whole other thread that would be 15 pages deep already.
So, I am not the only Memphian lurking on this board!
I already have. Many times. You keep going back to the first year they had the Mets. It takes time to build relationships with advertisers for something that was new to the station. Especially after being on WOR. You don't add a new program (outside the format) and it immediately makes a profit. It takes a few years. In the meantime, WINS adds an FM simulcast, and that affects WCBS ratings. Lower ratings mean lower spot price. Yet in 2023, the station moved from #11 to #10 on BIA. How did that happen? You haven't explained that. Especially given the advertising headwinds that affected radio after the pandemic.
This place is so toxic right now with you and the rest of the armchair CEOs writing post after post celebrating the loss of this great station, justifying it as business as usual. No compassion for the talented people thrown out of work to make room for a leased sports repeater. No remorse for the tens of thousands of listeners taking to social media to say how it feels like a death in the family to lose this heritage radio station and the sense of companionship it gave them.
I honestly don't understand how some people here seem to relish such ruthlessness as if they're personally benefiting from it. You act like you're some kind of big business expert but I'm sure you're not sitting in the corner office counting your money after firing your whole staff and screwing the audience over. You seem to delight in it though. You are just so out of touch with how it affects others.
That's a different discussion. As I said, I was a member of AFTRA. I worked in NYC radio. I know some of these people. That's a separate conversation.
880 will NOT be a "sports repeater." That's simply factually wrong. It will carry the original local programming currently on 98.7. The network programming will remain on 1050.
I have no financial stake in any of this. Thankfully. I took all of my personal money out of OTA radio 20 years ago and put it in tech.
I personally know how it affects others because I still work in radio.
CBS News Radio clearances have been relatively low for decades compared to ABC and others. I know that, at one time, CBS had the reputation of being somewhat inflexible, requiring that the news at the top of the hour be carried at the top of the hour, save for sports and other events. But I doubt that's the case any more. It's putting out a good quality product. There's still at least a little prestige associated with it. So what's the deal? Outside of the legacy O&O's, it's hard to find. In Denver, it's on Salem's KNUS...now there's a combination...during off-hours. (KNUS actually does have local newsreaders.) When GE still owned KOA, that station was the CBS radio affiliate for Denver. In Albuquerque, it's on KIVA, the station I couldn't find last year when I was in the city because it was broadcasting at 1660 instead of its licensed frequency of 1600. (KIVA has since fixed that; see posts I made last year.) In Kansas City, it's bounced around for decades, having been, at various times, on KAYQ (1190), KCMO (810), KMBZ (980); and....? I don't know where it is now if it's present at all. KTRH in Houston was a CBS radio affiliate up until the late 1980s; I thought CBS radio news had been on KPRC at a subsequent time but, again, I don't know if CBS radio is in the Houston market at all now.
You look at this page - Where can I find CBS News Radio? - and you see mobile apps, social media presence, streaming audio platforms, webpages, and then, as if it were an afterthought: "Of course, we're on the air on over 400 radio stations across the United States." That comes along with a map that's hardly readable and no actual list of stations. The map is a static image and isn't clickable. There's no lookup function. It seems that they know they have a distribution problem and have shifted their priority to more direct-to-consumer platforms. That's not a bad idea but I have to wonder how they can sustain a news operation like that.
Hey @CTListener I decided to be productive and realized it was discontinued in 2021.
Part of the reason is the product. ABC invested in music format prep services when CBS was only doing real time hard news. ABC then invested in digital content that its affiliates could place on their websites. As I said, CBS News benefited from being on the CBS owned radio stations. That benefit went away when the stations were sold to Audacy.
I don't know that anyone is 'relishing' people losing their jobs or WCBS shutting down and people losing their programming. It is, unfortunately, to Audacy, a business decision they have made. I'm not applauding it, but I'm an old-school guy who grew up listening to WLS, WABC and all of the other clear channel AMs at night and when I went into Radio, I stayed in smaller markets because I truly enjoyed the local aspect of interacting with listeners, advertisers and employees everyday. As a matter of fact, that's why I could never own a station in a market like NYC. It's not my cup of tea. Ratings don't mean anything to me. I don't live or die by them. I always hated having to fire people, even when they deserved it. I could never be like Audacy or Alpha and just chop off entire clusters of employees. I would never operate that way, because I was taught you operate within your means, you NEVER sell off assets like towers or office buildings, and while we all played music, YOUR employees were what set your station apart from Fred down the block.
Just to emphasize where I come from, I was looking at some stations near me just last year. All owned towers and buildings, good staff, and nice small market (think less than 10k in the COL). The owner is taking out tons of money, because he's owned them free and clear for 20 years. No debt. He also does over 300 football, basketball and baseball games for local high schools each year, plus each county fair and farmers market in a 5 county radius. He works 7 days a week. I also told him, as attractive as they are, he'll never get rid of them while he's alive at his asking price, because HE is the station. He does 90% of the games, all of the remotes, and does mornings 7 days a week. He's 10 years older than me, and I told him 'thanks, but no thanks', because when he leaves, so does most of the revenue as advertisers are buying because of him.
If owning and operating Radio in NYC were as attractive as people seem to think, 98.7 would have been snapped up immediately, instead of still being on the block today.
Audacy has a loss-leader contract for the Mets—a team that, again, has no radio network because the Wilpon family doesn't care—pays to employ the announcers, and will be subsidizing coverage for GKB, which gets to crow about ESPN New York now being "The Home of the Mets" without them ever having to lift a finger. Hardly comparable to the Yankees, which are the Yankees and have a following and the clout to justify their expensive deal with WFAN.
How much will Audacy be making from GKB annually minus the expenses incurred from the Mets? And this circular argument of "trust me, bro, I know" doesn't count. But then again, I expect no proof here and pages upon pages of posts with conjecture, so I ain't holding my breath expecting actual proof.
Really? How do you know?
Show me proof it isn't. They're paying to employ the announcers and no network exists. WFAN gave up the Mets a decade ago because CBS couldn't afford to keep them and the Yankees, and I find it very hard to believe anything ever changed in that regard.
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