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Bottom 200 Thinking

It was suggested on another thread that comments being made were merely expressions of hatred for Cumulus. No! It’s not about disliking this operator or that operator. What it is … is simple dissatisfaction with what I like to call "Bottom 200 Market Thinking".

It does appear as though Lew and John gained a tremendous amount of experience operating small market stations, market ranks in the 200's, back in the day, and that they're now taken all the small market lessons (in efficiency) they learned somewhere like, say, Abilene, Texas, and applied those lessons directly to broadcast operations in Dallas.

It's no exaggeration that the present day 'dfwradio' group has devolved by orders of magnitude in stature, quality and innovation as compared to the once proud dfwradio operated by Susquehanna. I don't ever expect the same quality from the Susquehanna days; I never, never hold them to that standard. We've come a long way from Susquehanna’s KLIF ‘TV infomercial’ and the worlds first radio tri-mul-cast days.

See for yourself, even the actual website, www.drwradio.com, looks like something commensurate with Abilene, as opposed to the proud and innovative website that was originated and maintained by Susquehanna back in the 1990's. In particular take a look at the picture of the six logo sign hanging on the side of the building. OH! Very Abilene! Looks like a sign I’d see on a radio building driving down South 1st Street in a market with 115,000 persons.

Instead of hatred, we are merely expressing total dissatisfaction with the reduction in quality of this major market group and its associated brands due to the present day operator’s paradigm shift from the previous operator's Big Time Radio / Top-10 Market thinking to the present operator’s Bottom 200 Market thinking.

Supporting this empirical "user" observation of a total shift in paradigm and resulting reduction in quality is a long list of personnel defections... the behind the scenes broadcast professionals who left the building with Susqehanna ownership. I won't get into that list.

Things always trickle down. Always. From trends in style and fashion to radio, going from large to small market is the norm. In the case of Cumulus, they are so innovative that they found a way to make things trickle up, from the Bottom 200’s to the Top 10’s; Cumulus has found a way to defy even the laws of physics (and marketing).
 
The Go-Go 90's are dead. Spots in DFW that went for $1000 a pop are now at $400 or less. You can't expect to take a hit in revenue like that and continue to operate in the same style with the same amount of personnel. Susquehanna got out while the getting was good. Citadel never quite responded to the new economy and mismanaged their way into oblivion.

I seriously doubt that the radio consumer in DFW has noticed much of a difference in stations like WBAP, KSCS, The Wolf or The Ticket since the Cumulus folks came to town. Their programming has remained basically the same with pretty much the same on-air personnel. So, while the building signage may be a bit generic, I think you would be very hard pressed to find stations that are programmed as well or as uniquely as WBAP, KSCS, The Wolf or The Ticket in a "Bottom 200" market.

Remember, Cumulus didn't bust in, guns blazing to take over these stations. They paid very good money for them. I'll bet they too wish they had the amazing dot com Dallas economy of the 90's and early 00's to work with. But, they don't. So, they're doing what they know how to do to recoup their investment. That means streamlining for efficency where they can. So, they may not have the flashiest or most innovative website but their core business, the Radio Stations, are still highly rated and pretty successful.
 
I hear both sides of the argument. CC is not different, not one iota. CBS keeps more differentiation between the signals than the other two shops. You want to talk about a HORRIBLE website, go check out CBS, and navigate thru that online hell hole. They merge not only the radio sticks, but the TV stations all in one site. The worst is there seems to be some forcefield that keeps it from uploading faster than an old 66 baud rate dial up modem.


http://dfw.cbslocal.com is the URL for all their DFW properties
 
metroneck said:
You want to talk about a HORRIBLE website, go check out CBS, and navigate thru that online hell hole. They merge not only the radio sticks, but the TV stations all in one site. The worst is there seems to be some forcefield that keeps it from uploading faster than an old 66 baud rate dial up modem.

http://dfw.cbslocal.com is the URL for all their DFW properties

I can see administratively that the local Radios/TVs could or should run together, but throwing all the stations in the same online spaghetti bowl is a mess. Just let each station have their own site, and link to each other or whatever.
 
JRZFM100 is dead-on right. I've seen this "movie" before actually. A small-market-minded group buys 'up' into markets they have no clue how to run yet run them as they've always ran the rest of the stuff. It doesn't work well. In fact, there is a group that had to sell some stations recently because they had the same mentality problem. When companies buy into a market, it would pay for them to assess how things are normally done in that market and ADJUST to the market's ablitites. Dallas isn't small market. San Francisco isn't either. In both markets they have brought great stations down, down, down. Why buy something if you're just going to ruin your investment?
 
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