Out of everyone I knew in j-school, I don't think anybody is in radio or went into radio. Some people are working for pro sports leagues, one was a newspaper reporter, one is at a national sports network, a few are TV multimedia journalists, some are in public relations. A bunch probably are doing something else.
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560
- Thread starter K108 Sacramento
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Cumulus is seeking to cancel its tower lease for KZAC as part of its bankruptcy:
radioinsight.com
Cumulus Media Seeks To Reject Leases As Part Of Restructuring; Surrenders Some Silent Licenses
As part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Cumulus Media is asking the court to have seven of its leases
radioinsight.com
Is it now safe to say that 560 in the Bay Area is toast?
It appears that way. As we've been saying in this thread for a long time, there's obviously something in that tower lease that's making it hard to sell.
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I have nothing but respect for the incredible journey you’ve had in the world of broadcasting. And I think you’re right, there are other avenues that allow a passionate an creative person to express themselves.
For me, radio was always about expressing myself. It was where I got to be funny, entertaining, and allow listeners to feel something that they otherwise wouldn’t. Leaving radio was difficult. Although I had been working on an advanced degree (and preparing myself for what most would consider an “adult” career), I quickly discovered that there was no outlet to express myself in the type of work I do now. In fact, being funny, showing any side your personality, or being talkative at my company is often frowned upon.
Fortunately, I decided to make a change and try something else. I purchased some professional broadcasting equipment and build a radio studio in my spare room. Then I started a podcast. The passion came roaring back, and I felt better than ever. Even if only 5 people end up listening to my podcast, I’d absolutely still be satisfied. I’m not making shows because I want to be an influencer, I do it because it’s fun for me.
I might eventually look into the possibility of doing some voice tracking from my home studio. I’m not sure how difficult that would be to get into, but I definitely could do it. I’ve been cautioned by the radio folks about how there’s zero money in voice tracking, but that doesn’t even matter to me since I always have my professional job. Putting together some voice tracks after work is something I’d probably do for free anyway, so if that opportunity ever arises, I’ll do it.
Journalism school has a legitimate payoff and use (in my opinion). I can’t say the same about broadcasting school. I don’t understand why anyone would want to pay to learn something that (many) radio stations could teach someone for free. That’s how I ended up here. I was a high school kid who wanted to learn about radio, and I found a station that needed me.
I can’t imagine how bad things would have turned out if I went to broadcasting school and didn’t try to set myself up with other options. It’s no wonder that so many broadcast programs have shut down for good.
What's your podcast about?
The best time to do something you want to do is when everybody you know had fun doing it. The second best time is now (or when you actually did it). I don't care how talented anybody is; at one point, we just got lucky. That's how you get into the business, and that's how you stay in. I've said it before, but I'm amazed at how many things had to go both right and wrong for me to land that commercial radio job. I was, however, also working toward something else when I was in radio. I was hoping to stay in while knowing the axe would likely swing at some point. In a sense, radio was my backup for the telecommunications job I'd had. I knew I needed a different backup after that!
Almost certainly. I suppose there's always the possibility that someone will buy the license and potentially try to resurrect it from a different site, but that seems even more unlikely know.
I was always told you didn't really need an education for broadcasting. You either could do it, or you couldn't. I don't know if that's entirely true as I already had a college education in a different field when I got that commercial radio job. You might not need to hold any specialty in broadcasting to be able to do it, but you have to be able to think, teach yourself, and adapt quickly. I would say an education helps with that. I'll also say that, if you truly know what you want to do and want to start quickly, you probably do get better preparation for your field from a trade school. The problem is that trade school educations are limiting. You just can't do as much with them as you can with college. My ex-SIL has an aunt who married into a family that owns a trade school. When her cousin graduated high school, they didn't send her to the family business.
The school I went to taught communications law and business, and those things are applicable to digital media today. I've visited my college and they now teach podcast production, digital music scheduling, and voicetracking. They're educating people for digital media today. They also have a single semester course in radio history, but it's taught as history, not as training for the present.
As of right now, it’s a collection of interviews with people I know (or who have been referred to) with strange or interesting life stories to tell. It was pretty difficult to get started, but it’s gotten easier over time as more people have come to me expressing interest in wanting to share their stories. While it started with people I know, it’s branching off into people I’ve never met (which is actually quite exciting).
It’s still in the early stages, but I’m having a lot of fun putting it together so far.
Honestly the “school of hard knocks” (aka my experience working in radio as an intern as a teenager) really helped me along my journey a lot more than any advanced degree. There were a lot of lessons I needed to learn back then that I really couldn’t get anywhere else. There’s value in diverse experience.
What I learned gave me the knowledge to reinvent myself as the business changed, and as a result, I'm still working in the industry.
The biggest impediment I read from people who've left the business is the money part. People say it was hard to raise a family on radio money. That's true if you see radio from a small perspective. But if you view it as part of a much bigger thing, there are more opportunities to make money.
There were also studio & office leases in the bankruptcy, and none of them are in San Francisco. So that means their current arrangement with Bonneville will continue. At least as long as Bonneville stays there, under its new owners.
The STL antenna lease would be cancelled, and I guess that's still at Battery street?
The STL antenna lease would be cancelled, and I guess that's still at Battery street?
There is a San Francisco lease in the exhibit: Bellaire Tower at 1101 Green (at Leavenworth). There are communications antennae on the top of that apartment building. Otherwise, there's no indication of what Cumulus was using it for. Not related to Cumulus, I believe this was the former site for 92.7 as well.
I think the money aspect is a huge problem for a lot people.
The money aspect was never a problem for me (I admit that I was lucky). I didn’t make much money from radio, but I was a student who had other things to do instead of worry about. Essentially, I got to have a cool job on the side while many of my peers were stuck working in places that weren’t nearly as fun.
The end result was that I felt a bit more freedom. Other people were so worried about saying the wrong thing or losing their job. I just got to go in and have a good time. In the context of broadcasting, I think you can always tell who is having fun and who isn’t having fun. This is why I have so much praise for Martha Quinn’s midday show. You can absolutely tell that she’s having fun every time she broadcasts.
Not just the sat truck, though that was a huge development in doing stories from further away. Years ago, I unearthed my desk calendar from 1986---my first year at KTVK in Phoenix, where new management was determined to take the station from worst to first. I started on March 21 and EVERY week for the rest of that year, I was on a plane out of town at least once per week to cover a story.
Back in October 2025, there was a thread on career paths in broadcasting and having a backup career in another field. I wrote a magnum opus on my own story at the time; I won't repeat it but will link to it here: Radio Layoffs and "Back-up Careers"
There's a slight irony for me that the subject has come up again: today (March 6) is 40 years and one week to the day that I was forcibly removed from broadcasting. In the unlikely event that you would care about what happened next, it's in the post I linked to.
I faced an interesting fork in the road at age 19. I was in the pre-journalism sequence at the University of Missouri, and needed to satisfy a mathematics requirement. Most pre-J students took Math 12, which was more about the history of mathematics than anything. It was considered an easy course. Journalism students had the reputation of being bad at math. Hardcore me took 80, which was introductory calculus. And did well at it. So well that the instructor, multiple times, begged me to switch to an engineering sequence. I didn't, but it was clear that I had some talent at mathematics. At the time, I felt engineering was kind of boring. (Ironies abound: ten years later, I got a master's degree in computer science, which is closely related to computer engineering, but more mathematical in nature.) I also really loved my political science and economics classes, which I would have had to de-emphasize with such a switch. Ultimately, I graduated with two degrees, one in political science, one in journalism, even with J-school's tendency to try to absorb all my time. Even with all that, though, when the KTRH ax swung 40 years and a week ago, I didn't have a backup plan.
I have some involvement with a multidisciplinary program at Missouri where some of the students are in journalism school but also seeking to branch out with courses in history, political science, and the law. Some of them have issues with their journalism professors who think they should spend all their time on their journalism classes and do nothing else. I faced that problem, too. The J-school has taken some steps in the right direction: the old silos between print and broadcast aren't as strict as they were before: "convergence journalism" with a combined print and broadcast newsroom is now the focus. Students do podcasts, Tik-Tok videos, Instagram, other forms of social media. They're getting exposure to AI. But some of the J-school profs haven't quite gotten the memo yet that a specialized, narrow education isn't going to serve their students well.
In these discussions, I often detect a certain breezy "if I did it, you can do it, too" attitude. That ignores the role of luck, of resources you can fall back on, and of disposition and talents, and of the sheer cost of everything now. Forty-five years of Ronald Reagan-inspired winner-take-all greed in our economy has benefited a few people at the expense of everyone else, especially of younger generations. They have a heavier burden now.
There's a slight irony for me that the subject has come up again: today (March 6) is 40 years and one week to the day that I was forcibly removed from broadcasting. In the unlikely event that you would care about what happened next, it's in the post I linked to.
I certainly didn't have the emotional investment in my own career the second time around. There is good and bad in that. As a journalist, I could be dogmatic at times and resistant to alternate approaches to various situations. As someone in information technology, I quickly learned that "there's more than one way to do it" (the semi-official slogan of anyone who's ever programmed in the Perl language), especially when trying to fix an errant program at 3 am that I had never seen before. I still have my opinions, but I am far more open-minded now.
Luck has been underemphasized in many of these discussions. Also important is attentiveness to opportunities when and if you get those lucky breaks. I think there are many fewer opportunities than there used to be.
You might be interested in this Substack post, an interview with Jeremy Jojola, who just moved from a job with KUSA to a job at parent company Tegna, focusing entirely on reporting via social media and so-called "vertical videos": A 9NEWS journalist burned out on TV news. Now he's betting on a format he thinks could save it.
Particularly in radio, I've noticed a certain amount of anti-college sentiment. I always thought that was foolish. Some people looked down on me because I was a college student. I remember my first radio job, where most of my co-workers had arrived from a St. Louis-based trade school. If something bad happened to them, their thought was that they would just get another job somewhere else.
I faced an interesting fork in the road at age 19. I was in the pre-journalism sequence at the University of Missouri, and needed to satisfy a mathematics requirement. Most pre-J students took Math 12, which was more about the history of mathematics than anything. It was considered an easy course. Journalism students had the reputation of being bad at math. Hardcore me took 80, which was introductory calculus. And did well at it. So well that the instructor, multiple times, begged me to switch to an engineering sequence. I didn't, but it was clear that I had some talent at mathematics. At the time, I felt engineering was kind of boring. (Ironies abound: ten years later, I got a master's degree in computer science, which is closely related to computer engineering, but more mathematical in nature.) I also really loved my political science and economics classes, which I would have had to de-emphasize with such a switch. Ultimately, I graduated with two degrees, one in political science, one in journalism, even with J-school's tendency to try to absorb all my time. Even with all that, though, when the KTRH ax swung 40 years and a week ago, I didn't have a backup plan.
I have some involvement with a multidisciplinary program at Missouri where some of the students are in journalism school but also seeking to branch out with courses in history, political science, and the law. Some of them have issues with their journalism professors who think they should spend all their time on their journalism classes and do nothing else. I faced that problem, too. The J-school has taken some steps in the right direction: the old silos between print and broadcast aren't as strict as they were before: "convergence journalism" with a combined print and broadcast newsroom is now the focus. Students do podcasts, Tik-Tok videos, Instagram, other forms of social media. They're getting exposure to AI. But some of the J-school profs haven't quite gotten the memo yet that a specialized, narrow education isn't going to serve their students well.
Which I think relates to what I wrote immediately above.
Yes. It's even more so today, with student loans. It may be too expensive to follow what you really want to do with those loans hanging over your head. And, if you run into financial trouble, you can't easily get out from under that debt. They can't be discharged in bankruptcy unlike, say, loans taken out by overambitious radio conglomerates hurtling headlong into a dwindling market.
In these discussions, I often detect a certain breezy "if I did it, you can do it, too" attitude. That ignores the role of luck, of resources you can fall back on, and of disposition and talents, and of the sheer cost of everything now. Forty-five years of Ronald Reagan-inspired winner-take-all greed in our economy has benefited a few people at the expense of everyone else, especially of younger generations. They have a heavier burden now.
I have a couple of friends---both excellent broadcasters---who started what I called "the only honest broadcasting school" in 1983. They finally closed it in January of 2025. What made it worthwhile was that they were in Los Angeles and gave students who couldn't possibly get a learn-as-you-go job in market #2 a chance to hone their skills as the jobs in small towns dried up. They were able to land gigs in medium markets from there. But again, the universe continues to shrink and the jobs aren't there anymore.
Amen! The vast majority of my career was made up of breaks that I never saw coming.