No. WINS makes $30 million a year. They get whatever they want.
My expectation is that 94.7 is trade bait right now. Audacy will sell or trade to anyone with a serious offer.
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Audacy return radio stations
- Thread starter MVB13
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No. WINS makes $30 million a year. They get whatever they want.
My expectation is that 94.7 is trade bait right now. Audacy will sell or trade to anyone with a serious offer.
Wouldn’t 94.7 need to be part of an existing cluster, in order to be viable?
Perhaps EMF may have some interest in using it to broadcast 95.5 K-Love’s sister station, Air1. But it is not clear whether it’s signal is significantly superior to their current one, WARW on 96.7.
It's managed as part of the NYC cluster. My view is the revenue 94.7 attracts is expendable in a cluster that bills over $100 million.
They can spin it off if it gets them another station in another market that fits their goals better. So perhaps a trade with Urban One.
How about that for wild speculation?
It does seem quite wild. As Urban One owns no stations in this market, 94.7 would be a stand alone station for them That would seem very disadvantageous for Urban One.
That's assuming it would remain their only station in the market. They seem to be on a buying spree.
WCBS (AM) is focused on Manhattan and the Boroughs, and the New Jersey signal is not a perfect match... plus it is not all that good even in the closest parts of Long Island.
More likely is that, eventually, WINS is left alone as the All News station. No other market has two, and the future of even one... in the long run... is limited as younger generations just don't want to give up 20 minutes in exchange for "the world"
By most accounts, WINS is the station focused on Manhattan and the boroughs while WCBS 880 is actually focused on the suburbs.
The 94.7 signal reaches a good part of those suburbs, notably parts of NJ where the 880 AM signal isn't great. The 880 signal is very strong to the East toward Connecticut and Long Island. So, 94.7 may not be a perfect match on it's own but it would actually work well in combination with the existing 880 signal to improve WCBS's coverage area to the west, and somewhat level the playing field with WINS by giving it an FM presence in a large portion of the market.
The question is whether that would bring in more money than keeping the low-rated classic hip hop format that currently occupies 94.7.
It looks like WCBS 880's share has not only held its own but has gone up since WINS moved to FM. Again, the two news stations are serving different audiences in separate geographic areas. Maybe Market #1 is big enough to support that. Both stations are still top billers, after all.
Sorry. Typed in the wrong calls. Of course, non-directional WCBS with its tower to the NE of Manhattan does better in the extremes of the market, particularly the western side where WINS (AM) is highly directional. So adding an FM that only covers part of the market well does not match the WCBS philosophy and purpose.
880 is pretty good in the part of NJ that is actually in the MSA. And keep in mind that, while it is not as good at the far western parts of Morris, Somerset and Middlesex counties, the population is much less dense the farther west you get and thus the lesser 880 signal is not a real disadvantage there.
Only one third of one county in CT are in the MSA, so that is not relevant.
The issue is that, generally, news stations that add FM change the entire identity away from AM. In the case of this FM, the signal is very deficient in about half of the geographical area of the market, and it is not even near perfect among the building of Manhattan and the dense apartments of most of the boroughs.
For the moment, no. The FM allows them to offer a broader spectrum to advertisers in packages.
But both are off by more than half, inflation adjusted, in the last 10 to 12 years. And they are so expensive to operate, even with consolidation.
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Maybe on paper, not in reality. It's terrible around the Meadowlands where all those 50kw AM transmitters overwhelm the AM section of radios in vehicles driving down the NJ Turnpike, Route 1&9 and numerous other busy roads in that area. And reception is challenging to say the least in urban areas like Newark and Jersey City which wreak havoc on AM reception.
So, the 880 signal really doesn't fare very well in the NJ parts of the MSA where a lot of people live and travel. I believe there is some issue of poor ground conductivity to the west of the transmitter that contributes to that as well. In any case, it's not at the same level as the rest of the NYC AMs around there, where 94.7 is at its best.
I know we've covered this before. But if you have the #11 best billing station in the U.S. on AM only, you don't let that slip away due to AM radio's gradual demise. If 94.7 WXBK were a successful station, that would be another matter. But it isn't. I assume it doesn't bill that well. Does it bill any better than 92.3 WNYL, when Audacy killed that Alternative station for the WINS simulcast?
If Audacy was willing to sacrifice underachieving WNYL to simulcast the #8 best billing station, WINS, why wouldn't it sacrifice underachieving WXBK to simulcast the #11 best billing station, WCBS?
Is 94.7 a deficient signal? Yes. But so is 103.9 in Philadelphia. And Audacy has made that the KYW simulcast. It likes 230 watt 103.9 WPHI so much, it only uses 103.9 FM in KYW's on-air mentions, not 1060 AM. At least WXBK is 40,000 watts, even though its directional antenna is in Rutherford NJ.
Yes, I understand all-news is expensive (although a bit less expensive since the WINS and WCBS newsrooms were combined). And it skews older. But with the sorry state of AM radio, it would be foolish to kill the goose that lays #11 golden eggs while keeping around Classic Hip Hop 94.7, that lays plenty of eggs, but none of them golden.
If Audacy was willing to sacrifice underachieving WNYL to simulcast the #8 best billing station, WINS, why wouldn't it sacrifice underachieving WXBK to simulcast the #11 best billing station, WCBS?
Is 94.7 a deficient signal? Yes. But so is 103.9 in Philadelphia. And Audacy has made that the KYW simulcast. It likes 230 watt 103.9 WPHI so much, it only uses 103.9 FM in KYW's on-air mentions, not 1060 AM. At least WXBK is 40,000 watts, even though its directional antenna is in Rutherford NJ.
Yes, I understand all-news is expensive (although a bit less expensive since the WINS and WCBS newsrooms were combined). And it skews older. But with the sorry state of AM radio, it would be foolish to kill the goose that lays #11 golden eggs while keeping around Classic Hip Hop 94.7, that lays plenty of eggs, but none of them golden.
Legalities aside [such as legal ID at top of hour] is it dumb or smart for a station to "conveniently" forget to ID the AM side of the station feeding the FM translator? One here in Ohio started out AM frequency first/FM frequency second station ID, then after a while switched to FM frequency first/AM second. Now it seems like they just forget to mention the AM side at all except for legal ID that's required, treating it like a red-headed stepchild that's best not to talk about. My thinking is that if it wasn't for the AM station, there wouldn't even BE an FM translator and the fact that their FM signal only broadcasts sorta to the west/northwest [which has the higher concentration of the "Richie Riches"] it's useless to anyone to the north/east/southeast, unless you like to listen to picket-fencing and signal dropouts.. I usually switch from one to the other as I get out of the FM signal and into the AM signal. I even talk to people that don't even realize they have an FM signal YET THEY'RE LISTENING TO THEM ID IT on the AM side. It just blows right by their eardrums I guess.
Answering myself, I could see them wanting to drive listeners to the FM side but they're still ranked # 9 in the market [yeah, yeah, 12+ but even so] and I'm guessing that's combining both the AM and FM ratings into one.
Answering myself, I could see them wanting to drive listeners to the FM side but they're still ranked # 9 in the market [yeah, yeah, 12+ but even so] and I'm guessing that's combining both the AM and FM ratings into one.
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Keep in mind the stations that subscribe to Nielsen can find out whether the majority of the audience chooses AM or FM.
My bet is the listeners that choose AM are more interested in the content than the station ID.
When the content's the same on both signals, I don't think it matters. my thing is that they bitch, moan and complain about how crummy the AM sounds; I tell them "You do know they have an FM signal now that you can listen to and the sound quality is much better and in stereo?" And their response is "I didn't know that!" And I'm like "How could you NOT know, they mention the damn FM frequency about every 5 minutes!" Mostly music, but they do a butt-load of sports broadcasts. Everything except tiddlywinks and horseshoes it seems like.
Translators are always attributed to either the HD channel or AM that they are rebroadcasting as Nielsen's policy is not to list stations that are not allowed to originate programming.
If they put The Block on 101.9 they would have gotten better ratings. Their signal barely covers the people that would listen. It's like they wanted it to fail all along.
I'm surprised by that. I'm on the MA-NH boarder and can get WCBS on a clear night, just south of Manchester, NH. It's faded, but I can hear a clear broadcast (able to hear the news reports) the closer I get to Boston. Obviously, I can't gage daytime coverage.
There is no way in a million years that The Block would make as much money as WFAN.
It's not about ratings, people. It's about money.
And now, fifteen more posts as to why Alt should have stayed, 94.7 should have flipped to WINS (and should flip to a simulcast of WCBS), etc.
Definition of insanity!
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