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Shouldn't San Francisco Have Any Local Talk Radio Shows?
- Thread starter Gregg.
- Start date
If all of the people who voted the other way listened to one conservative talk station, it would be #1. A 4 share station would be Top 10. Plus all of these conservative talk shows are syndicated, and they just need a clearance in Market #5. The actual ratings don't matter.
Similarly, Ms. Harris won 82% of Manhattan, 72% of Brooklyn and 73% of the Bronx. Despite that, WABC and WOR get adequate ratings.
So the new call letters will be KZAC. Hmmm. Could Cumulus be unveiling a format of music by Ringo Starr's son?
Seriously, I wonder if the company chose those call letters with an idea of what will go on 560 AM when the simulcast ends? Or is it that K-Zack sounds like a cool call sign, regardless of the format?
iHeart has some cities where it owns multiple talk stations. Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Louisville. Denver actually has three iHeart News/Talk outlets: KOA, KHOW and KDFD. As for Cumulus, in Dallas it has WBAP-AM-FM with its mix of local and national shows, along with KLIF 570 which airs mostly syndicated material. So it's not out of the question that 560 will also be talk. After all, what else can you put on an AM station these days?
But unlike those other markets where the high power station airs mostly local shows and the lower power one runs the syndicated programs, I suppose in SF, it won't be that. My speculation is that 810 KSFO will simply run the higher-quality syndicated shows. 560 K-Zack will run whatever is available that isn't getting picked up on 810, 860 or 960.
Seriously, I wonder if the company chose those call letters with an idea of what will go on 560 AM when the simulcast ends? Or is it that K-Zack sounds like a cool call sign, regardless of the format?
iHeart has some cities where it owns multiple talk stations. Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Louisville. Denver actually has three iHeart News/Talk outlets: KOA, KHOW and KDFD. As for Cumulus, in Dallas it has WBAP-AM-FM with its mix of local and national shows, along with KLIF 570 which airs mostly syndicated material. So it's not out of the question that 560 will also be talk. After all, what else can you put on an AM station these days?
But unlike those other markets where the high power station airs mostly local shows and the lower power one runs the syndicated programs, I suppose in SF, it won't be that. My speculation is that 810 KSFO will simply run the higher-quality syndicated shows. 560 K-Zack will run whatever is available that isn't getting picked up on 810, 860 or 960.
All of which have different niches:
KOA - morning news block, midday talk shows of the mildly conservative variety, sports after 3 pm, Broncos football, Colorado University football, Rockies baseball; news every half hour, usually local but ABC in periods when not staffed.
KDFD - all conservative syndicated talk; Fox News on the hour.
KHOW - one or two local conservative talk shows, some brokered shows, otherwise leftovers; news on the hour, usually local but ABC if not.
The competition is Crawford's KLZ and Salem's KNUS, the latter of which does have some local content. There's also Colorado Public Radio, KUNC, and some programs from Boulder's KGNU.
Yet there are 20% who voted the other way. No station in San Francisco gets a 20 share so there is plenty of room for a conservative, talk format, the issue being whether it is well done enough for the taste of that market. I believe that many nationally syndicated hosts just do not have a fit, even with conservatives on the West Coast.
But there is definitely a percentage of the market that might listen to conservative talk. And remember, you have only named a couple of counties and the market extends all the way from Santa Rosa down to Gilroy.
And the market has half its population outside New York and the boroughs.
Though it isn’t in SF/the Bay Area, KSCO has some conservative talk shows that aren’t syndicated.
DavidEduardo is right. Trump flipped Nassau (Long Island) for the first time since H.W. Bush for a Republican. He did flip Lake County CA (Lakeport), but I doubt many people up there listen to KSFO or KTRB. The difference is there's far more swing/Republican voters on Long Island and in NJ as there are in the Bay Area - and it has been that way since Bill Clinton.
I grew up in Nassau County on Long Island. It and its sister (Suffolk County) have traditionallys been Republican-dominant. But not MAGA-style Republican. It's always been the moderate conservative brand. In recent years there's been an influx of people from NYC that have shifted the counties to the center, such that the they've often gone for Democrats like Clinton, Obama or Biden, or governors like Cuomo and Hochul. Trump may have managed to eke out enough votes to flip Nassau back to where it traditionally used to be, but I wouldn't bet the farm that he'll be able to keep it there.
If I recall, you're in the Bay Area... Are you able to check what's on AM 560 now?
Did he really? Huh. I'm kind of surprised, since Lake County has been reliably blue in every election since '88.
It's a sign of the times, I suppose.
c
For the last twenty minutes (8:40-9:00 am PST), 560 and 810 were still simulcasting. Both stations are running a "Year-In-Review" from a week or two ago by their cut-rate morning team of Armstrong & Getty (syndicated out of Sacramento), though slightly out of sync.
At the TOH, they ID'ed as "KSFO-KSAN-HD2-KGO San Francisco", just as they have since this simulcast began. So no changes yet.
(Excuse me while I leave to medicate the brain and ear damage from listening to those bozos.)
Why does talk radio have to be defined only by politics? What happened to all the local issues that I heard all the time in the 70's, 80,s early 90's? On stations all over the country. You all know what killed KGO. It was the fact that so many other stations in the bay area went N/T and to sports talk which totally diluted the KGO audience. And the biggest contributing factor was consolidation and all the C suite executives that are sucking up all the profits for themselves you all know who they are. And all the debt service that consolidation created that has now resulted in many bankruptcy reorganizations. It's a good thing that Alex Soros investment in Audacy resulted in a new private company hopefully he will replace David Field and fix his mistakes. Well?
And the aging listeners that faded away.
KGO’s audience was not diluted. The station simply started default in the earlier 2000s because the management team did not adapt to changing taste and preferences. The coup d’grace was the advent of the PPM at the end of that decade. The PPM showed no increase in cume (nearly all stations had considerable increases with the PPM) and reduced time spent listening because of the more precise measurement; KGO listeners who would write “10 AM to 2 PM” we are now seen to listen for perhaps 40 minutes or so instead of 240 minutes due to interruptions breaks and such.
KGO died all on its own
The decline of KGO started in the very early 2000s and had nothing to do with anyone but the local GM and PD.
Do you realize that David Field is neither responsible for the 2008 recession nor four the Covid pandemic? In fact, multiple banks with highly experienced analyst approved the loans that permitted the transactions that created the larger company. Those banks and investment bankers believed in Field’s expertise and his companies management team, which had a good track record up till them.
There is a little different that a new team can do for that company except to further cut expenses and to sell off under performing stations.
Because the AM audience (much of which is 55+) does not want to hear local issues, they want politics. Speaking of, I don't understand why Red Eye Radio had to go the conservative route. The truckers have Sean Hannity, Andrew Wilkow, and others on Sirius Patriot (and many truckers listen to SiriusXM). When I listened to the Road Dog Trucking channel on my road trip through Montana last year, I loved the little stories that the truckers shared on the live show. Eric and Gary on RER should be talking about issues relating to the trucking industry, and/or allow the midnight oil truckers to share appropriate stories for radio. They can get their conservative fix from MANY other sources. Isn't that why it used to be called the Midnight Trucking Radio Network in the first place?
Likewise, the closest we had recently to an unbiased talk show on AM (not counting Coast to Coast) was the late Jim Bohannon, and at times, John Batchelor.
I'd say it was even earlier than that; it just started its decline from such a strong position that the rot was hidden for a while. I moved to San Francisco in 1999, at that point in my early 40s, though still young and beautiful at least in demographic terms, and tried listening to KGO because I had heard so much about it. I found the programming unappealing. By that time, people didn't need a radio call-in show to spout off about various topics; there was Usenet and various bulletin-board services that could serve the purpose...especially in the Bay Area.
This isn't to say that KGO was a bad station; it was probably very good for its time but its time passed.
Because it has become the safe thing to do.
San Francisco does have local talk radio but it’s on NPR affiliates. I don’t know how commercial talk is going to work specifically for the Bay Area but every time we talk about talk radio specifically we keep going back to the 1980’s when the framework of right wing talk became popularized when Rush Limbaugh replaced Morton Downey Jr on KFBK Sacramento.
en.wikipedia.org
How much of this is that we keep going back to a time when Sacramento County was more Republican in the 1980’s than it is today. The last time conservatives won the county was in the 1988 elections. But this content is not how it was in the past.
Sacramento County, California - Wikipedia
How much of this is that we keep going back to a time when Sacramento County was more Republican in the 1980’s than it is today. The last time conservatives won the county was in the 1988 elections. But this content is not how it was in the past.
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