Cumulus’ gambit with briefly turning KGO into a partially all-news station failed because KCBS — the long-established and truly all-news station — remained dominant and well-known in the format. KLIV, KGO and another station that briefly dabbled with that format in the mid-1980s never were able to fully compete and all cycled out of that format. While I have been living in the South Bay and Bay Area since 2014, I never listened to KLIV during its South Bay-oriented mostly all-news days to know what that’s like as little marketing was ever done for that station and I only knew to listen to KCBS.
KGO was all-news on weekdays except for overnights but continued with talk on the weekends. KLIV was focused on the South Bay, which only made sense because it didn’t have much of a signal in the central Bay Area, much less the northern reaches of the region. The history of “all-news, some of the time” isn’t populated with examples of success. KCBS even tried it, well before my time in the Bay Area, and eventually went back to all-news.
KGO was making a heritage play. For decades, they did news in the mornings and afternoons---and beat KCBS. By the time they decided they needed to try that again, KCBS had become the news station.
As you pointed out upthread, though, the measurement techniques of the time hid some significant weakenesses at KGO. At the risk of being tiresome, I’ll repeat my observation of KGO upon moving to the Bay Area in 1999. I wondered why anyone would have listened to it. It seemed dominated by old folks. This was, of course, back when I was not an old folk.
I posted about it to ba.broadcast. The KGO groupies that dominated that part of Usenet mostly ignored my observations. To be fair, I’ve never been much of a talk-radio listener and gravitated to all-news when it was available. At the time, I would have been the kind of listener that KGO would have needed to move forward into the future. I found it offputting. So I landed on KCBS.
Moving to the Bay Area after living in Chicago, I had to adjust to KCBS’s style, which was a little more laid-back than what I had been used to from WBBM and WMAQ. But that wasn’t hard. The content was there. And how could you
not like Al Hart?
Purely hypothetically---if KGO had continued to do news in the mornings and afternoons instead of going purely talk, KCBS might never have been able to establish dominance in drive times, and KGO would have had an engine (news) to draw in younger adult listeners looking for information.
I’m a little confused about your hypothesis…are you referring to the time after KGO gave up on all-news-some-of-the-time? There were still newscasts then, even if the staff was greatly cut back.
Something a surprising number of radio executives didn't understand: If you're going to challenge a dominant, established leader in a format, you need a unique selling proposition---what can you do that they can't? How are they underserving the audience? What will make you better?
In some ways, I think KGO tried: for example, network news was delayed to :05 and the top of the hour was local. They promoted that on-air, too. I don’t remember a lot of promotion for KGO in other media, though. Traffic reports were on a different cadence than KCBS. Given how bad Bay Area traffic had gotten, I don’t think it would have been ridiculous to have had traffic reports on a six-minute cadence (i.e, ten times an hour). Then they could’ve promoted the pee out of it. But they didn’t do that.
Ultimately, though, I don’t think the resources were there to sustain the all-news approach. There was too much reliance on reports from KGO-TV, which also made it hard for the radio station to carve its own identity. Cumulus came to a knife-fight with a spork.
Another factor could have been KQED-FM, which steadily beefed up its news operation during the time I was in the Bay Area. It became a credible alternative for listeners wanting more depth than KCBS could provide. However, KQED never matched KCBS’s strength in spot news. They had, and have, distinct identities.
It's especially critical in news radio. In music radio, if someone punches the button, it's likely to be to go to another music station. But the majority of news listeners, when they punch the button, will go back to music, or (maybe) talk. Very few will punch out of news to news. They exist, but not enough to make a competitive audience from.
My 1990s Chicago habit in the car was to punch back and forth between WMAQ and WBBM to catch the latest traffic report, to see if I would have to exit the Northwest Tollway early at Arlington Heights or continue to the bitter, off-ramp-free end at the toll booths when returning home to the city. But that’s a highly tailored, personalized use case. It can’t be made into a generalized use case.
More broadly, news is news, and if someone is tuning away from a news station, that’s probably because they don’t want any more news right then and there. WMAQ ran into this: WBBM was first in the format and was a top-notch operation. WMAQ was a top-notch operation, too, and a little more innovative than WBBM. Both devoted plenty of resources to news. But, due to late 1990s consolidation and WMAQ’s underdog status, WBBM was the survivor, and the sports-talk audience was motivated enough to follow The Score through two frequency changes, finally landing at WMAQ’s 670 spot on the dial.
Those Chicago moves happened at about the last possible moment for them to have worked, in my opinion. KGO waited too long. As with so many successful enterprises in various fields, past success covered up developing weaknesses. KGO had a loud cheering section, too. At some point, the old tricks quit working. That happened to coincide with multiple ownership changes.
It wasn’t just KGO. KFOG ran into the same problem: an aging audience devoted to the station almost to the point of hanging onto it for dear life. KFOG was also very smart about creating an early online community of “Fogheads”. But it didn’t seem to adapt to a younger audience over time. The last couple of years of KFOG’s existence were an effort to get a younger alternative audience but, for all of KITS’s defects at the time, Live 105 was already there, and had the reputation. Ultimately, Cumulus had to sacrifice something to protect the KNBR cash cow by gaining an FM presence, with the end of KFOG being lamented a lot less than I would have expected.
It’s popular to beat up on Cumulus, but, at least in the Bay Area, they ended up with a bad hand and are gradually having to clean it up. That probably means more exits. Maybe not right away, but the next time a cost-cutting mandate arrives from Atlanta, there’s still something to shed. Whether an exit is a sale or an outright annihilation is something we’ll find out anywhere from next week to 53 days from now. Suspend disbelief that a station with good coverage in a large market might go away.
