Clear Channel may be neutered, but so is Citadel. It's an industry-wide situation.
Both companies just posted significant first quarter losses. Both companies have been laying people off nationally as well as locally. If neither company can afford to staff their stations with live and local talent, where are they going to get the money to promote a new format?
In Clear Channel's case, the "losses" may very well just be translated as "eating into our profit, but we're still OK." At Citadel, the message in the quarterly filing was along the lines of "we need to raise $150M that we don't have, and we need to do it within 7 months or else we're going into default." In a situation like that, it's highly unlikely there will be money made available to give a new station a "proper" launch.
Sure, you could just have a quiet launch, maybe run promos on sister stations, and let word of mouth do the rest. And yeah, some people will find it and listen, and it might take a little bit away from B104. But without strong, local personalities and some top-notch promotions to practically bribe people to turn the dial, there's nothing Citadel can do that CC won't be able to match. Just because the newbie country station will play classic country doesn't mean it will be an immediate success. It just means the heritage station will throw a few classic titles into their own clocks, and listeners will ooh and ahh about it before they even realize the new station exists.
Let's consider another idea -- WFRG in Utica also plays country, and they're going at 100,000 watts -- twice as powerful as WBBS. Their signal covers pretty much everything B104's signal covers. If WBBS was doing such a bad job, wouldn't WFRG be getting more than 1's and 2's in the Syracuse book? After all, WFRG does virtually no promotion in Syracuse, but they still managed to get better P12+ numbers than Movin, Nova, WNSS and WFBL in the last publically-released book (Spring 2008). You can probably use WFRG as a model of the results a station would get with little or no outside promotion.
I'm sure a format flip on 95.7 would get SOME promotion, but you're still competing with an entrenched #1, in a format where listeners are very loyal. The entire team has to be willing to give the station a 120% effort, non-stop, for at least a few years. And that team starts with the jocks and sales people, and it goes all the way up to corporate. To do it right, you have to be prepared to invest so much time and money, you may have very little profit, or even losses, before you finally start to make significant progress against the leader. But right now, Citadel is only concerned with generating the cash for that $150M debt payment before January. They aren't in the position to be spending more than they're making, especially considering the new format may need that extreme TLC for at least 3 years before it begins paying off, if ever at all. Corporate numbers people just aren't into long-term ideas like that.
