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KLove finds interesting way to covet St Louis

Ryan Williams said:
I'm not sure that fits this situation. Also, most of us who study the Bible do not use the King James Version anymore.
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Check the typo in the subject line. Should have used a grin or wink emoji. Oh, and my people don't use the KJV either, and never have. English kings didn't want us around, anyway.
 
Ma Gee said:
Answer this please. Why does St. Louis need K-Love? Sandi and the Joy-FM people have done an amazing job for more than two decades.
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Identnut said:
Why does St. Louis need The Bull? WIL has done an amazing job for more than four decades.
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The question of "need" is kind of beside the point. K-Love clearly wants to have a national brand, has the capital to make it happen, and is willing to cut deals. It's very corporate in that way.

In the process, St. Louis is likely to lose a community-based station with eclectic programming. Such stations are highly dependent upon listener and community support. It's unfortunate but, at the same time, indicative that the level of support necessary either wasn't forthcoming or was overcome by internal station politics, a recurring "feature" of many such stations. K-Love is taking advantage of the situation to advance its own mission. KDHX leadership had an alternative but rejected it for reasons not known publicly. I'm less inclined to blame K-Love for the likely outcome and more inclined to blame KDHX's own leadership.
 
Thanks for that answer. I think I get what you’re saying. And maybe at 65 years old I’m just too naive to grasp why K-Love seems to think so “corporately” about these moves. The thing is, to me, this isn’t like iHeart seeing the money Hubbard makes with WIL and deciding they need a piece of those St. Louis country radio dollars with the Bull.

Christian radio to me isn’t about “corporate” or at least it shouldn’t be. Gateway and Joy-FM have ministered to St. Louis (I know, Christianese) far better than most Christian broadcasters ever have. In my view, Joy and Boost are very much like community radio. They’re non-profit and listener supported and by all appearances offer a wanted form of programming not available from corporate radio that the community of St. Louis finds more than worthy of support in return.

The key to this, at least for me, is that like with any non-profit there is a limit on the number of dollars available in that listener support. Spend some time at ECFA looking over Gateway’s annual financials and see just how well St. Louis has chosen to support Joy and Boost. But once K-Love enters the market, does anyone expect that K-Love’s own fundraising won’t take away from Gateway’s. To me it appears that just a few hundred thousand in lost giving to Gateway quickly puts Joy / Boost in the red.

And there is why I asked does “St. Louis need K-Love?” Is there so vast a difference in music and presentation between K-Love and Joy that St. Louis will benefit from K-Love’s entry? Can K-Love’s server at a transmitter site, one size fits all network be capable of sowing directly into St. Louis in a better way than what Gateway / Joy / Boost currently does? Of course not. So tell me, what does St. Louis stand to benefit from K-Love?

Again, perhaps I’m just too naive, too old school to understand why K-Love sees the need to decrease Joy’s listenership - or more importantly take a portion of the money that currently is directed to Joy? Where is the directive that Christian music radio be a national audio feed with very little to no direct community outreach or involvement? We’re not talking about a market like Chicago or Indianapolis where there was no current Christian music radio at the time of K-Love’s arrival. St. Louis is a market that has been served and continues to be served extremely well by Gateway / Joy / Boost.

It seems to me that K-Love entering St. Louis will do very little to further benefit the market. By it’s pulling away audience and support dollars, at least in my opinion, I see it doing far more damage than good. K-Love will treat St. Louis in the same superficial way they treat NYC, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Indianapolis ad nauseam. I pray I’m wrong but I suspect Joy / Boost will be diminished by K-Love’s perceived need to be in every market - a need that, at least for St. Louis, isn’t there.
 
Identnut said:
St. Louis needs K-Love way more than San Juan, PR does. I've only ever heard one radio tuned into it, a touristy shop in Old San Juan.
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I have always wondered why they have the English language format on the Puerto Rico station. I think that there is a very mistaken impression about the use of English on the Island; many can speak English, but that is not the language they use at home and, except in tourist regions, at work.
 
The answer is Boost and Joy will lose a few listeners. People listen to something they don't like too much because it is the best choice on the dial. K-Love will catch these people. K-Love and Air1 do not sell underwriting. It is all listener support. Will it be really different from Joy, perhaps, and likely not like Boost. Because the EMF formats are 100% music, they will gain listeners more from secular stations. The Christian music formats seem to reach about 8 to 12% of the radio listeners. Nobody should suffer and if they do, they had better quit playing it that close to the edge and get on with their A game. Everybody knows you have to have plenty of padding to get past bad times.
 
Cold Coffee said:
How many Christion radio stations are easily received in Saint Louis?
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Let’s remember that, like “Spanish” the tern”Christian” is not a format but a marquee for a bunch of formats ranging from teaching to contemporary music. So there can be a handful of such stations in a market, either all being different.
 
to answer Ma Ge: no I was never an owner of a Wichita Falls station.

My memory flashed to my first boss who said a few things I thought were brilliant. One was you always have plenty of cash in reserve. He said businesses watch you. If you make forward steps, you are successful and businesses want to be on your station. It's when you make a forward step and have to step back you are seen as failing. If you have the reserve to take a step forward in tough times and maintain it, you got it made.
 
Ma Gee said:
Thanks for that answer. I think I get what you’re saying. And maybe at 65 years old I’m just too naive to grasp why K-Love seems to think so “corporately” about these moves. The thing is, to me, this isn’t like iHeart seeing the money Hubbard makes with WIL and deciding they need a piece of those St. Louis country radio dollars with the Bull.

Christian radio to me isn’t about “corporate” or at least it shouldn’t be. Gateway and Joy-FM have ministered to St. Louis (I know, Christianese) far better than most Christian broadcasters ever have. In my view, Joy and Boost are very much like community radio. They’re non-profit and listener supported and by all appearances offer a wanted form of programming not available from corporate radio that the community of St. Louis finds more than worthy of support in return.
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I understand your point of view and I'll admit that my first reaction upon hearing the news about KDHX was "Good God, not again!" It was especially poignant to me because I heard the last year of KDNA before it sold out to Heftel to become KEZK. As a teenager recently arrived from rural Iowa, I really couldn't appreciate much of what KDNA was doing, so it didn't have an impact on me. But as I was exposed to other such stations (such as KOPN, which got some of KDNA's equipment), I had a better understanding of its place among the choices available on local radio.

Still, what K-Love is doing amounts to the radio equivalent of Manifest Destiny: there's always new land to conquer (until there isn't).

EMF's recent renaming to "K-Love, Inc." was, I thought, appropriate to the way it operates: smooth and corporate, few rough edges, providing a middle-of-the-road service that's relatively inoffensive, standardized everywhere.

Ma Gee said:
And there is why I asked does “St. Louis need K-Love?” Is there so vast a difference in music and presentation between K-Love and Joy that St. Louis will benefit from K-Love’s entry? Can K-Love’s server at a transmitter site, one size fits all network be capable of sowing directly into St. Louis in a better way than what Gateway / Joy / Boost currently does? Of course not. So tell me, what does St. Louis stand to benefit from K-Love?
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K-Love at one time would have asked those questions but I don't think that's where they are now. K-Love fundraising, whenever I've heard it, comes off as rather high-pressure to me. This may force locally based operations to do likewise.

It does seem that at least some markets can comfortably accommodate multiple Christian-contemporary operators. Denver has K-Love, Pillar (which has local roots), KTLF/The Light (based in Colorado Springs), Way FM, Grace FM, and I probably forgot one in there. Some are ostensibly commercial; others aren't.

So here's an interesting question, or at least interesting to me: do donors to contemporary-Christian stations concentrate all their giving on one station in their area, or do they spread their money around to multiple stations (where available)? This is a world I don't have much insight into.
 


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