Are you referring to death notices? Are they still free?
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AM Radio is dying
- Thread starter Ronnie Milsoup
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The irony is that all of the changes in music recording technology happened during your lifetime. Starting with things like multi-track recording in the 50s. The music made then was processed to sound good on AM radio.
I'm a little bit older than you, but not much. I didn't get the opportunity to start dialing into the local BBS'es until either late '89 or early '90 when I was a freshman in high school, but I spent a lot of time on them during my high school years. We had an IBM PC Jr starting around 1983, and it was the first personal computer on the block. I have more power in my smartphone in my pocket than that PC Jr, which took up a whole closet in my dad's office, had.
I stopped reading newspapers because, after I moved back to a college town in '01, the carrier constantly changed, and each change meant having to complain that my paper was no longer being delivered to my door or my balcony. It would always get dropped in the courtyard at my apartment complex. I didn't like that, and my landlord hated it more than I did. After getting a couple violation notices, I decided to just cancel the paper. I moved into a condo in '07 and have lived in a house for almost 10 years now, but, even by early '07, the door-to-door newspaper salesmen who used to come by a few times a year were relics of the past. If the online subscription had been offered at the same promotional price as the paper, had been updated in a timely manner, and had a layout that more resembled the paper, I probably would've just changed my subscription. You are correct, however, that the newspapers have cut costs to the point that they don't cover the news like they once did. My local newspaper only has one local reporter, and I think she works from home now. It's co-owned with some nearby smaller towns' newspapers, and all the reporters work together to provide stories throughout the region. It sold its building downtown several years ago. My mother used to subscribe to her local newspaper, but the costs kept going up, and it's a fraction of what it once was. It has fewer pages, fewer stories, fewer coupons in the Sunday edition, and just has less of everything. I think she still gets it online, but she wasn't willing to pay more than $10/week for a physical product that was declining.
From what I've been told, the Lee newspapers stopped publishing those a few years ago. I don't think Gannett publishes them either.
No one publishes obituaries in newspapers anymore unless it's a famous person who gets on in the NY or LA Times.
They do it online. There are online sites for that now. It's the same thing with wedding announcements. That's a thing of the past.
Newspapers have outlived their usefulness for a lot of things that they were important for providing in the previous century.
The Cincinnati Enquirer prints obituaries everyday, with more than two pages on Sundays.
Are they free or paid?
Even 40 years ago funeral homes submitted and paid for obituaries to be read on the air in small town radio if the families wished it to be done.
When the company I was with had an AM/FM in Lake City, FL, the AM had reports from each of the Lake City and Live Oak funeral homes in the noon news block. The names of the deceased and their closest family names were given along with visitation and funeral service times.
The reports were very brief, and not done with funereal organ music or the like... more like a news report. Each funeral home paid a flat rate each month, and the notice was part of the burial package. Someone many years before had come up with the package and since then all the funeral homes had bought in, year after year.
When Docket 80-90 more than doubled the stations in the market, the funeral homes stopped buying their little notices because the station had to cut back on its local news coverage when market revenues were split 5 ways instead of 2 ways.
Jeopardy question: What hurt radio more than the internet?
Answer: Docket 80-90
Answer: Docket 80-90
To me, it's a combination of things, starting with the explosion of FM in the 70s that more than doubled the number of radio stations in each market, and started the long death of AM. After 1980, the impact of AM Top 40 radio faded completely. By the end of the 80s, many of the founding companies that owned radio sold out. RCA/NBC, GE, National Life Insurance (WSM), and many more. Then came Docket 80-90. That further over-licensed the spectrum to where 7-7-7 ownership limits were obsolete. That led to the 96 Act. That further drove out the big diversified companies and left radio-only companies, that only had one revenue stream. Then, of course the internet. But if all the other things hadn't happened, and companies like Westinghouse and Nationwide still owned radio stations, things would be very different.
I just finished reading William Cohan's Power Failure, which is a history of General Electric under Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt. The GE broadcast operations don't play much of a role in that story, but are an example of Welch's approach of either being number one or number two in a line of business, or otherwise getting out of it. The radio and TV operations were relatively small - Cohan cites Schenectady, Nashville, and Denver; and Welch sold off all except the Denver TV station. This was before the NBC purchase a few years later. In that era, GE was a company that was emulated. It wasn't the only factor in making divestitures popular; Harvard Business School dogma had to do more with it as did the difficulties in managing a diversified conglomerate. But it's certainly a factor.
The other relevant lesson I took away from the book was that continued expansion fueled by cheap money for financing - in GE's case, its own unregulated banking arm's sales of short-term commercial paper that leveraged GE's AAA credit rating to get money on the cheap - eventually hits limits. GE might not have been in the shape it's in today if it hadn't been so focused on acquisitions and growth for their own sake. The 2008 financial crisis dealt GE a blow and suddenly it was about to run out of cash and had to take steps to shore up its capital position that ultimately sent it into a downward spiral and into a forced marriage with private equity which is now milking the company for all it's worth. Aside from GE's ability to avoid a bankruptcy proceeding, does this sound familiar?
I hate private equity.
They take any company they can get their hands on, gut it of any valuable assets, and turn it into a pale shadow of its former self.
For example:
If said company is, for example, a smallish, family-owned regional chain of retail tire shops and PE wants it, they will buy that company and all its assets by offering the original owners a price they can't refuse. Then, as part of their so-called "optimization", they will sell off the most valuable of those assets, such as real estate, for a quick profit to pay down any debt incurred by the purchase of the company (such as what usually happens in the course of a leveraged buyout), and rework whatever is left into a lean money making machine whose only purpose for being is to milk every customer to the greatest extent possible for the sole function of lining said PE executives' pockets.
Many employees deemed unnecessary will have been layed off, and whomever is left will be severely overworked, and in many cases underpaid. Virtually none of the money saved is reinvested into the company to improve whatever services or products they offer or to maintain in a safe and reasonable manner the buildings they reside in, quality takes a nosedive, the cosmetic, health and safety conditions of their stores deteriorates drastically, and those few remaining employees are demoralized and miserable due to being forced to work under such conditions.
Then, when the company's reputation is finally ruined, no longer has any customers and most of the remaining employees quit (or, perhaps the company gets sued because either a customer or employee got sick, injured and/or killed in an accident due to unsafe conditions, or the building is damaged or destroyed with the property owner(s) of said building is left holding the bag), the CE people shut down any physical operations at all stores, establish a holding company for any remaining intellectual property (branding) that they didn't already sell off (perhaps under a different name to mislead any lawyers or health and safety officials), and then make their money licensing said IP to the highest bidder(s) in perpetuity.
I may be a bit fuzzy on some of the details, but in my observations in following the slow but steady decline of once great companies like GE and, recently, Boeing, retail outlets like K-Mart, Sears, and innumerable others, and of course, Audacy, iHeart and many other big broadcasting/movie companies, some variation of this pattern unfortunately seems to applies to them all.
(Rant Mode off)
c
Why do more people die on Sundays?
Because they'd just had a tough week.Why do more people die on Sundays?
Ours does each week, as well as the local remaining dailies.
Yep. The other thing that sounded familiar was they sold WGY Schenectady to a local company called Empire in 1983, and the company went bankrupt in 1992. Dame Media bought it in a bankruptcy sale and later sold it to Clear Channel.
They are not free.
The serious answer is that the Sunday issue is the biggest-selling issue of most daily papers' week, or at least it was when dailies published seven days a week and print circulation was the most important statistic. Families would often request that a loved one's obit that had run earlier in the week be rerun on Sunday so more potential friends and acquaintances of the deceased might be able to see it.Why do more people die on Sundays?
I know, hence the
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