By then we had changed the focus to "La 10-20". The Liberman Brothers (not a country group....) were so cheap that when they bought KTNQ they did not want to pay to change call letters!
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FCC approves Latino Media Network acquisitions
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
You said "US politics & news." The article doesn't mention anything about US politics. So that leaves a lot of other things.
Here's what the article says about the target audience:
Perhaps I wrote it confusingly. "US Politics" as opposed to "state level politics" or "international politics. "News" as in "current happenings". Since they can't do local and state news with the expressed intent of not being local, that means "national news".
Economic immigrants who escape poverty have no interest in the news from their nation of birth. Political refugees, such as from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and now Colombia and Peru, are very interested in what is happening in the homeland as they live with a dreaming of "going home".
And she is ignorantly wrong, beginning with the term "... are Spanish immigrants". Few are from Spain... she obviously meant "Spanish speaking" but could not even get that right.
Then she assumes that economic immigrants want to hear about "home" and "tradition" and the like. They don't, overwhelmingly. I can't tell you how many people in focus groups and one-on-ones when discussing talk radio and the home nation said that they left that behind because they could not survive and they wanted nothing to do with that. Yes, things like food, family, music are all cherished... but not the nation that made them leave "home" to go to a strange nation.
So I did not address her horribly mistaken impressions. Instead, I looked at what they were looking for in a COO, which indicates national talk about national political, social and related subjects.
And yet it seems that Radio Mambi spends a lot of time talking about Cuba for some reason. Maybe I just don't understand.
And that is an example of what I went on to say about political refugees vs. economic migrants.
What I said "Then she assumes that economic immigrants want to hear about "home" and "tradition" and the like. They don't, overwhelmingly. I can't tell you how many people in focus groups and one-on-ones when discussing talk radio and the home nation said that they left that behind because they could not survive and they wanted nothing to do with that."
And that is what has sustained CARACOL Radio in Miami for two decades, also... the Colombians who left out of fear of the FARC and drug-related violence but who followed the news to see "when we can go back home". (CARACOL is the name of the biggest radio net in Colombia)
But the economic refugees, from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and the like are not making plans to ever return and don't want to know about the place they had to leave to progress. In the immense majority of cases, those of the middle class from, for example, Mexico, don't migrate to the US as they live much better "at home".
What's the story with WADO 1280? Will that one be part of the sale? I know there was some kind of environmental thing going on near the transmitter site...
Here's to hoping the deal goes through. WADO is ready for some new blood and ownership. Univision just wrecked it.
It’s no secret that TelevisaUnivision offloaded the poorest-performing stations in their whole group to LMN. WAQI has been hampered not only by the turmoil from the sale, but from Univision selling off the transmitter land several years earlier and undergoing a power reduction.
I know I had said this in the prior thread, but LMN overpaid and absurdly so.
To be honest, Miami is an anomaly of a market. WAQI has long targeted a population diaspora that just doesn’t exist anywhere else, and it’s been (by and large) successful.
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Speaking of KTNQ, the (badly) scoped airchecks of Charlie Tuna and The Real Don Steele one finds these days on line sound like absolute crap. Not only are they terrible sections of recordings, but the recording quality sounds like someone held a Lafayette cassette recorder microphone up to a handheld transistor radio speaker, and recorded it on the cheapest cassette tape one could own. I remember back in the 80's, hearing some excellent scoped airchecks of Charlie Tuna, The Real Don Steele, Gary Owens, and Wink Martindale.
No, the available audience "wrecked" it. Hispanics are the least prone to using an AM station of any group. Nations like Mexico have tried to move all AMs to FM, leaving only a few in markets where there are no available channels or along the US border where channel separations must meat the ancient US standards. Elsewhere, such as El Salvador, all that is left on AM is Christian programming.
After reading this thread and a couple of the articles, it looks like the LMN folks have a steep hill and will need a lot of financing for a while.
The odd thing is that the major US political parties, both of them, always refer to Latinos as one massive monolith, who all think alike, live alike, and hold their opinions in common, both socially and politically. Obviously, that isn't the case. And if the LMN folks are thinking like either of the political parties, it just might be their #1 problem. But I hope they can make it work, the same way I hope BIN works out in the long run.
The odd thing is that the major US political parties, both of them, always refer to Latinos as one massive monolith, who all think alike, live alike, and hold their opinions in common, both socially and politically. Obviously, that isn't the case. And if the LMN folks are thinking like either of the political parties, it just might be their #1 problem. But I hope they can make it work, the same way I hope BIN works out in the long run.
My bet is on this being a 2024 play, and after the elections the stations will be spun off or disposed of.
The majority of the "name brand" Hispanics on the board of this group are later generation Hispanics who generally don't use Spanish language media or even speak Spanish fluently. Your observation as to the lack of understanding of Spanish dominant Hispanics could be most valid.
Further, going back to my posts about why multiple efforts at national Spanish language talk formats have failed enormously, the language, interests, culture and even the reasons for having come to the USA are very different among the various migrant groups.
Wow…one and done?😬 Should we start speculating on what format would follow LMN on those stations?🤔 Probably Spanish language religion for KLAT in Houston…no idea of what KFLC and KFZO in DFW would become…😣
You'd be speculating based on someone else's speculation. At some point, a double negative kicks in.
The idea that a group overpaid for a bunch of no-audience AM stations to influence an election is very far fetched.
The same group could have more effect for a lot less money by using social media.
There have been multple statements to staff about the purpose of the acquisition being to have a different perspective for the 2024 elections.
That is the stated purpose as expressed by several of the "all star" panel of Latino influencers. Several have expressed that they will need a year of "outsourced" programming in order to get ready for the 2024 election year which is "when their voice will be needed".
One of the reasons they bought the properties was to avoid them being sold to a conservative radio group that was "near a deal".
But none of the people who put this together have any current or recent radio experience. The two women who are the organizers have zero radio experience and are both political activists and campaign organizers.
Of the directors, Tom Castro has no operational experience, although is is or has been on the board Cumulus. María Elena Salinas was a Univision anchor in Miami, but has not worked in radio since the 1980's when she was at XEPRS-Tijuana which programmed for the LA market.
The are still looking for a COO: Chief Executive Officer The job description shows how little they know about radio.
Isn't there such a thing as "Business Spanish", or an equivalent of the somewhat homogenized midwestern English used on most radio and TV (even in area with a regional accent)?
Are you talking about only Miami or the other stations?
From what I understand, the "different perspective" was to stop making up stuff and passing it off as news.
But what's wrong with a "different perspective?" Isn't that the point of having free media? If you don't want a different perspective, go to Cuba. At least in Miami people have a choice. Nobody will be forced to listen to LMN.
The fact of the matter is that almost all of the stations have little or no audience. You have stated that Hispanics have no background to listen to AM radio, and you've also slammed their programming ideas. Based on all of that, why should it matter what their purpose is if it will have absolutely no effect?
The same could be said of Mary Berner.
All of them. They are not going to operate each market individually.
No, that was only the opinion of one person in regards to one station, WAQI in Miami. Radio Mambí has, for nearly 40 years, been the most important voice of the Cuban exile and reflects the position of Cuban refugee, not that of a later generation Mexican heritage American from the Southwest.
That's not the point. The Cuban exile community in Miami had counted on Radio Mambí since the 1980's as the most important voice for their cause. Remember, these are people who fled Cuba in rafts made of inner tubes and the like, because they had witnessed family being shot by Castro's puppets or relatives and friends put in prison and tortured for having democracy on their mind.
Radio Mambí has consistently been in the top 10 stations in Miami. Hardly "no audience".
On the other hand, the group seems not to understand that in most markets Hispanics have abandoned AM entirely.
It does not matter overall, but in Miami the feeling of censorship of a traditional anti-Castro voice is frightening. As I have mentioned, I'm an honorary (and only non-Cuban member) of the Cuban Journalists in Exile Association and have very strong feeling... mostly based on the horror stories told to me by Cuban exiles of the horrible repression of the Cuban regime.
She's not political... just a person brought in to try to save assets. In her case, what was needed was pure finance and debt negotiation.
So they have a year to find another station. Most of the hosts have already left, so who cares?
We're talking about a group of 18 stations, not just Miami.
Then it doesn't matter. Nobody will listen and the stations will all go silent.
There are several other stations, including one owned by Audacy, that have taken up the "Joe is a socialist" banner. How many stations do they need?
These LMN people are community organizers. The FCC rules are all about serving the community. They know how to do that.
They can hire radio people. They have money left to do that.
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