> I respect your knowledge Mr. Fybush, but I don't necessarily
> think that past coverage of a market is significant. Here in
> areas like Phoenix, where new residents are living in every
> faraway corner of the valley (NE, NW, SE, and SW), further
> and further out, even good signals by today's standards will
> eventually become weak. The reality is that, like it or not,
> the suburban migration is becoming an exurban migration.
> Since not every station can be 50kW or 100kW, the remainder
> will have to learn how to program accordingly.
No argument there. My only point on the past coverage issue was to address the idea that "if WIXY could win in Cleveland with a bad signal, WHAT should be able to do OK in Philadelphia," and in that respect, past coverage IS significant, at least inasmuch as WIXY's signal wasn't so badly matched to the market back in Big Jack's day.
You're quite right about the exurban migration, at least in your part of the country. Here in the more tightly-packed, slower-growing northeast, there are both natural and economic barriers to that kind of extreme market sprawl. Go too far south from Cleveland and you're in Akron, go too far east and you're in Ashtabula and go too far west and you're in, er, Mansfield or Sandusky or somewhere else.
That leaves at least a little more promise for signals like the old WIXY, which still cover a substantial portion of the market, especially by day.
AM in a market like Phoenix will have a harder battle to fight, as the sprawl moves beyond even the strong-signal contours of the big guns like 550 and 620. At that point, if you're doing any kind of mass-appeal format, you'd probably want to be on one of the South Mountain full-C FMs; otherwise, you end up filling some sort of niche based on where your signal actually reaches. "Learn(ing) how to program accordingly" is quite the apt phrase.
> I heard Big Jack say recently that he had measured audiences
> in areas where WIXY didn't put ANY signal to. Obviously,
> that's more based on his popularity than listenership, but
> the fact is that people are aware of great programming and
> will do what they can to listen.
That also tells you that the ratings then were just as suspect as they can be now. You simply can't listen to a station that doesn't put ANY signal where you live/work/drive, of course, and even if Your LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDER's popularity was such that people would write him down in a diary even when they couldn't hear the station, that's still phantom listenership that you can't (OK, shouldn't) try to sell to advertisers.
> When ABC sells WWMK, the
> new owner COULD prospecively turn it into something
> decent... maybe not along the lines of WTAM, by sheer issue
> of The Big One's aptly titled signal domination. But not
> every station can be #1.
Right - by matching the programming to the signal it reaches. I'm not quite sure what niche you get with Cleveland's south suburbs and the city (OA? OA?), but there's got to be something you can do with it. For now, I'd say Radio Disney's not the worst option.
The same, incidentally, is completely true of WHAT. The urban-focused talk that it was doing and will be doing again fits nicely with the area the signal actually covers. AAR didn't. The only problem ICBC faces now is that it's up against another station with substantially the same format (WURD), but with a better signal and a head start on listener loyalty.
> he'll get better placement. Rush is on 50kWs because he
> started out in tiny markets (remember when he begged Ft.
> Wayne listeners to patronize the BBQ restaurant there so the
> station wouldn't drop him?) and on crap stations in medium
> sized ones. Randi Rhodes can claim she beat Rush because she
> was on blowtorch WJNO and he was on the Class C colon
> cleansing station. But amidst such awful placement, he
> performed well and worked his way up. It's a lot easier to
> turn and burn 1kW stations rather than rip up a heritage
> flamethrower only to discover, gee... Al Franken's getting a
> 0.2 share... we should have kept Rush.
I vividly remember when Rush started in the Rochester market, circa 1988 on what was then a brand-new 500-watt daytimer 20 miles south of town, WYSL 1030. He slowly built up a nice following in town, and a couple of years later Ed McLaughlin struck a deal to move the show to WHAM, over the strenuous protests of WYSL's owner.
Again, though, I'd caution against reading anything much from that experience into the specific situation with WHAT. WYSL's signal back then wasn't all that great in Rochester, but it was on a completely clean frequency (at least outside of critical hours, when WBZ began bombing in) that was at least listenable in most of the market. WHAT is literally impossible to hear in many of the parts of the Philadelphia market that would have been most interested in its AAR programming.
(And, tangentially, I think that's the first time I've ever heard WJNO described as a blowtorch! Until a few years ago, it was on the decidely class C/graveyard 1230 facility, and even now its 10 kW day signal on 1290, the old WBZT facility, is nothing to scream about south of the Palm Beach/Broward line.)
> The libtalkers that do well on the weak independent stations
> they start on will get swiped by corporate guys with better
> coverage. Like in Sacramento where the local bumblers are
> losing AAR to an Entercom station. Corporate programmers are
> smart in that they eliminate risk by waiting for someone
> else to test the format, in some cases, at least. Do you
> really think AAR will stick with the 500-watt daytimer when
> they start pulling in 2s and 3s?
Substitute "any progressive talk syndicator" for AAR, and we're in complete agreement - as witness Schultz's recent clearance on KSL, about as far from the "500-watt daytimer" level as it gets.<P ID="signature">______________
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