• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Buffalo News article on Citadel/Cumulus

G

GeorgeKramer

Guest
Updated: March 10, 2011, 2:46 PM


The owner of four Buffalo Niagara region radio stations is being acquired by a rival broadcasting company in a deal worth $2.4 billion.

Citadel Broadcasting Corp., which owns WEDG-FM, WGRF-FM, WHTT-FM and WHLD-AM locally, agreed Thursday to a long-discussed deal with Cumulus Media that will combine two of the nation's largest radio station owners.

The combined company will own 572 radio stations in 120 U.S. markets and rank as the second-largest owner of radio stations in the country, behind Clear Channel, which owns more than 800 stations.

The deal is a bet by Cumulus that the radio advertising market will continue rebounding. Like other media, radio broadcasters were hard hit in 2008 and 2009 as the recession cut deeply into the ad spending that generates most of their revenue. An advertising shift to the Internet also siphoned money away from radio stations.
 
Wow... speaking of The Buffalo News:

The Buffalo News offers more buyouts
Published: March 9, 2011
Faced with a drop in net profit, The Buffalo News is offering a new round of buyout options to some of its employees, including those represented by its largest union.
 
Sorry to hear about the News downsizing...they were holding up a high standard for print journalism in the upstate region, I hope it won't be compromised.

As to Cumulus, I wonder if the Dickey family will be any better at managing their properties in upstate NY now than when the Dickey family first came to the region 30 years ago. They bought WSAY from the Gordon Brown estate, and at first invested heavily in trying to make it a real competitor for WHAM...then gave up on it, turned it into a wheel-of-formats situation, and finally dumped it--ultimately it turned into the news and public affairs arm of the WXXI organization, and finally found the loyal and steady audience it had been seeking since 1936. :)

Hey, if history repeats itself, will we ultimately see WNYC AM 770 in New York, and KQED 810 in San Francisco? ;)
 
Mr. No is apparently an expert on all things media related. If he thinks the Buffalo News is bad, he should see the Gannett rags in the rest of the state.
 
Lets see...Buffalo news revs down over 17% in the first few weeks of the year...bad trend and you bozos think they are putting out good product. You all are probably reading your papers from cover to cover while you listen to your 8 track tapes. Google
Pergament and see what he thinks of the product. I'll take his insite over yours any day.
 
Pergy's blog is pretty good.

The News apparently never hired his replacement.

Jeff Simon is OK but he doesn't really focus in on specifics for TV and radio.
 
"If he thinks the Buffalo News is bad, he should see the Gannett rags in the rest of the state."

So true...the Gannett paper in Rochester is a sad example of a once-good paper sliced to pieces by downsizing of everything from the staff to the news hole in the paper itself. Can't say the Newhouse operation is appreciably better in Syracuse...
 
Pergy got "retired", and you expect him to say nice things about his former employer?

The Buffalo News has lost a lot of revenue, and a lot of talent in the last few years. Are they as good as they once were? No. Are they better than other newspapers in metros the size of Buffalo? Yes. Are they better than some newspapers in much larger metros? For my money, yes.

The News is trying to adapt, and frankly have the best local coverage on-line. If they ever looked at the IP addresses of local TV newsrooms, they'd find that their content's being ripped off by everybody - commercial and non-commercial. Then again, that's not new. Whether they can monetize their content is the problem faced by every news gathering organization in the world right now.

Maybe you'd prefer the NY Daily News approach - which might generate more revenue, or more profit since the costs of printing rumor instead of reporting are lower. I'm sure that's what Herb Tarlek would prefer. I'd rather have a paper that at least pretends to have journalistic standards, whether I read it on newsprint or on-line. BTW, some of the music that originally came on 8-track tapes is still earning pretty big money for a lot of people on much newer technology today.
 
intheeno said:
Lets see...Buffalo news revs down over 17% in the first few weeks of the year...bad trend and you bozos think they are putting out good product. You all are probably reading your papers from cover to cover while you listen to your 8 track tapes. Google
Pergament and see what he thinks of the product. I'll take his insite over yours any day.
Click to expand...

I happen to enjoy the Buffalo News. I think they have excellent sports and news coverage. They've lost some good writers in the last few years to either retirement or unfortunate death. What newspaper's revenue isn't down in this era? It doesn't necessarily indicate their product is bad. Of course I'm not Mr. intheeno(it all) so I must be wrong. ;)
 
The News isn't perfect but it gets it right more far than wrong, which is more than can be said about other local and national hard copy providers. As Rox notes, The News website is a 'first stop' for countless competing news providers. The News has spent significant resources in making its website an immediate response mechanism and multi-media platform. In many cases, it surpasses the website efforts of the Buffalo radio and television stations.
 
intheeno said:
I think its the duty of a newspaper to get it right all the time, not just better than 50 per cent. If you only knew the political bias that goes into the slant of the stories you would understand.
Click to expand...

No news organization - electronic or print - can possibly get it right all the time. Even "objective" reporters let bias slip into their stories. People bring their past experiences and worldviews into their reporting. It's human nature.

I was told recently that until 40-50 years ago the public at large simply understood this...reporter bias was to be expected and the best way to understand a story was to consume multiple accounts from different sources, if you wanted to take the time to do so...then make up your own mind. Over time, if a particular news source proved untrustworthy, the free market would take its course and that entity would either change or go out of business.

That said, it doesn't help matters when cost-cutting leads to any given media outlet relying on fewer and fewer sources until it just regurgitates the AP feed - or any singular source. But there are so many options available to us now. Critical thinking requires looking at current events from differing perspectives, or at the very least understanding that when you read/hear/see a story in the news, it's not - and can never be - absolute gospel.
 
chas108 said:
Even "objective" reporters let bias slip into their stories. People bring their past experiences and worldviews into their reporting. It's human nature.
Click to expand...

Objectivity doesn't seem to be popular any more. Everyone comes at a story from a point of view. Just reporting the straight facts, the who, what, when, why, and where, seems boring and quaint in the world of blogs and commentary available now. It's like trying to be Arthur Godfrey in a world of Howard Stern.
 
"Maybe you'd prefer the NY Daily News approach - which might generate more revenue, or more profit since the costs of printing rumor instead of reporting are lower. I'm sure that's what Herb Tarlek would prefer."

Actually the Daily News, under the ownership of Mort Zuckerman of US News and World Report, is a pretty decent paper these days, a lot of flash on the front page and a lot of sports on the back pages but some decent and balanced content, and good reporting, on the pages in between. If you want trashy tabloid stuff, opinion, and rumor by the column inch, the NY Post is what you want, it's literally Fox News on paper ('cause they're both under ownership and editorial direction of Rupert Murdoch).

Western NY has never seen anything like it. Channel 7 under Irv Weinstein's editorial direction was certainly loud and brash, but it was never partisan, and everyone at every publication or station in the area was under strict orders to play it straight. (Jim McLaughlin, my boss at both KB and BEN, told me he never wanted to hear a slanted story on the air, only verifiable fact--and if he got complaints about a story on a controversial issue from both sides, that was one way he knew we'd gotten it right.)
 
Lots of talk about "synergies", and "systems based operating culture", "operating systems and technology platform", "centralization", "leverage", and "scale based operating efficiencies".

How's this for a bullet point:

  • Combined entity will be attractive for recruiting and development of new sales, programming and management talent

And don't miss:

Post-consolidation Management Structure
Employing 20+ Senior Executives Across Every Functional Area

I'm betting that Farid won't be one of them. Sounds bloody to me. You have to feel sorry for the poor people at Citadel who figured that they'd made it throught the bankruptcy, and that the worst was over. Unfortunately, the light at the end of the tunnel was Ozzy on board the Crazy Train.
 
What do you expect? They didn't buy these stations to give each of them their own building and fiefdom style management. The writing was on the wall two years ago. If they didnt get the message then, their heads were buried in the snow.
 
TheBigA said:
What do you expect? They didn't buy these stations to give each of them their own building and fiefdom style management. The writing was on the wall two years ago. If they didnt get the message then, their heads were buried in the snow.
Click to expand...

Fiefdom? There own building? Hahahaha. Where do you get this stuff?

Sorry. I forgot your contention that the people who actually produce the product don't really matter. Here, you'll like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ne13Zft9Q
 
SirRoxalot said:
Fiefdom? There own building? Hahahaha. Where do you get this stuff?

Sorry. I forgot your contention that the people who actually produce the product don't really matter.
Click to expand...

I don't know if that's MY contention. It'll be interesting to see with what they do with Citadel Media (the former ABC Radio Network in Dallas). That place is a production center, far more involved that a typical radio station.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom