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FM news 101.9 - why did news on FM fail?

N

nd2023

Banned
Many markets got their heritage all news AM on to FM over the past decade. Why did nobody listen to the news on 101.9 rather than 880 or 1010. They were blessed with Hurricane Irene and Occupy Wall Street increasing listener’s appetite for news.

I think the lack of promotion did it in. People didn’t know that FM News 101.9 existed unless they tuned past. No billboards, no TV. Heck, even a tent at Occupy Wall Street would have been great promotion! Also, they wanted to target women and dumbed down the news.

I wonder why Audacy didn’t decide to put 1010 WINS on 101.9 when they bought the station from Merlin.
 
NickD said:
I wonder why Audacy didn’t decide to put 1010 WINS on 101.9 when they bought the station from Merlin.
Click to expand...

Because ESPN Radio New York had added 98.7 to its 1050 signal on May 1, 2012.
CBS Radio wanted to protect WFAN's revenue and thus purchased the 101.9 signal,
with the LMA (and simulcast) beginning on November 1, 2012.

As the failure of FM News showed, WINS (and WCBS 880) did not need the same protection at that time.

Note: the WFAN-FM simulcast might have happened a bit sooner than it did but first: CBS Radio had to prove to the FCC
that CBS property WLNG TV 55 in Riverhead should *not* be considered part of the New York market,
thus CBS could add the 101.9 signal to their cluster without going over the market limit.
(8 total AM - FM - TV with no more than 5 in one band.)

At that time, CBS owned WCBS-TV, WLNG-TV, WFAN 660, WCBS 880, WINS 1010, WXRK (later WNOW) 92.3, WCBS-FM 101.1, and WWFS 102.7. 101.9 would have made it 9 properties; CBS was successful in proving to the FCC that WLNG-TV was "out of market".
 
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Merlin head Randy Michaels was a shock radio programmer (WLW, WFLZ “The Power Pig”, “Hell 94.7”, the Tribune-era WGN) who is the last person you want to build an all-news station from scratch. FM News had no direction, no gravitas, and ultimately no chance against two deeply heritage brands in town that remained on AM.
 
Nathan Obral said:
Merlin head Randy Michaels was a shock radio programmer (WLW, WFLZ “The Power Pig”, “Hell 94.7”, the Tribune-era WGN) who is the last person you want to build an all-news station from scratch. FM News had no direction, no gravitas, and ultimately no chance against two deeply heritage brands in town that remained on AM.
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Kind of Lee Abrams trying to reinvent a newspaper, except you would expect a lifelong radio man to have some idea about radio news programming. Abrams had no clue about print, or the internet, for that matter.
 
NickD said:
Many markets got their heritage all news AM on to FM over the past decade. Why did nobody listen to the news on 101.9 rather than 880 or 1010. They were blessed with Hurricane Irene and Occupy Wall Street increasing listener’s appetite for news.
Click to expand...
That was because the people who sought news on the radio trusted the two established news stations and not some Johnny-come-lately news station.

NickD said:
I think the lack of promotion did it in. People didn’t know that FM News 101.9 existed unless they tuned past. No billboards, no TV. Heck, even a tent at Occupy Wall Street would have been great promotion!
Click to expand...
I'm sure you were joking about the tent, but seriously, if anyone tried to set up a tent promoting FM News 101.9 or any other corporate project, then the Occupy Wall Street protesters would have told them to get lost.
 
Just being on FM was never a guaranteed win for FM News. It had no legacy/heritage in the market, so it was relatively unheard of. It hardly impacted CBS, who didn't really need to fend it off with two stations in the format, and it failed as a result. It also was plagued with technical issues, which turned people off.
 
I listened to FM News. The big problem is how they started. Trying to be a news station for females. That probably left a bad first impression. By the fall, they evolved into a more straight forward news approach. Toward the end a lot of it was voice tracked. The staff were talented, they did a decent job but they didn't succeed in time. They were given less than a year.
 
CBS tried the exact same thing in Washington DC. In 2011, they moved the WNEW call letters to 99.1 and tried to do an all-news format to compete with WTOP. Bad idea. Total failure. They then tried to evolve it into news/talk by adding Dave Ramsey. They finally gave up in 2015 and turned the signal over to Bloomberg Financial News. They moved the WNEW call letters back to New York, and changed 99.1 to WDCH.
 
Don't forget, it failed in every market they tried it in. As others said, it had to be the way it was being positioned. Am I wrong, or wasn't Randy Michael's trying to program it to be female leaning, with a presentation that one would see on GMA or Today? I remember thinking of it as such. Kind of like turning on my local CBS, ABC, or NBC affiliate and getting local news for drive time, then more female leaning pop culture and entertainment pieces after.
 
I agree with pretty much everything in this thread.
The creators, a crew of stodgy middle aged or boomer aged men with little to no experience with news radio, thought they could build a news station that caters primarily to a female audience.

Why they wanted to skew female in the first place is a bit of a mystery. Why they thought they could pull of such a feat is a bigger mystery. The content, if anything, was condescending toward the audience they were hoping to attract.

Interestingly, FM News began to follow much more of a traditional approach to the news radio format in its final several months on the air. The product started to sound much better. But their news gathering and reporting resources were no match for 1010 and 880, and obviously 101.9 in NYC and 101.1 in Chicago were bleeding cash like crazy.

CBS Radio's WNEW was placed on a stupid signal for a DC metro targeted news format. Station sounded crustier and more repetitious than WTOP, too. At one point, 99.1 WNEW was doing traffic reports every four or five minutes.
 
MarkW said:
CBS Radio's WNEW was placed on a stupid signal for a DC metro targeted news format. Station sounded crustier and more repetitious than WTOP, too. At one point, 99.1 WNEW was doing traffic reports every four or five minutes.
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It was the only signal they had. They had previously used it for WHFS. When they got whacked by WTOP, they decided to target the signal to Baltimore. The results were the same.
 
MarkW said:
I agree with pretty much everything in this thread.
The creators, a crew of stodgy middle aged or boomer aged men with little to no experience with news radio, thought they could build a news station that caters primarily to a female audience.

Why they wanted to skew female in the first place is a bit of a mystery. Why they thought they could pull of such a feat is a bigger mystery. The content, if anything, was condescending toward the audience they were hoping to attract.

Interestingly, FM News began to follow much more of a traditional approach to the news radio format in its final several months on the air. The product started to sound much better. But their news gathering and reporting resources were no match for 1010 and 880, and obviously 101.9 in NYC and 101.1 in Chicago were bleeding cash like crazy.

CBS Radio's WNEW was placed on a stupid signal for a DC metro targeted news format. Station sounded crustier and more repetitious than WTOP, too. At one point, 99.1 WNEW was doing traffic reports every four or five minutes.
Click to expand...
In Chicago, they had content like this.
 
TheBigA said:
CBS tried the exact same thing in Washington DC. In 2011, they moved the WNEW call letters to 99.1 and tried to do an all-news format to compete with WTOP. Bad idea. Total failure. They then tried to evolve it into news/talk by adding Dave Ramsey. They finally gave up in 2015 and turned the signal over to Bloomberg Financial News. They moved the WNEW call letters back to New York, and changed 99.1 to WDCH.
Click to expand...
The issue in DC was 90% signal based. They tried to compete with a full market heritage station with a rather mediocre rimshot that actually covers more of the Baltimore market than the DC market.
 
gr8oldies said:
In Chicago, they had content like this.
Click to expand...
That was the day they launched the news format out of stunting. They didn't have the proper automation (NexGen) setup yet. They were not fully ready.

If I'm allowed to post these here, these are some airchecks:

Female-era:
www.mediafire.com

MediaFire

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.
www.mediafire.com www.mediafire.com

Regular news-era:
www.mediafire.com

MediaFire

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.
www.mediafire.com www.mediafire.com
 
gr8oldies said:
In Chicago, they had content like this.
Click to expand...
Where that is a embarrassing moment (be it during the launch or during stunting), the greater issue is that the mindset was an issue with the general cliché of "if it's not broken, don't fix it." Nationally, there isn't (nor then was there) this notion that newsradio was broken. If anything, they simply went hybrid of newsradio and talk radio in smaller markets.

Personally, I despise stunting (outside Christmas music formats). The whole wheel of formats, or insert format for two weeks here is something I personally don't enjoy. Instead of keeping the listeners of the previous format happy for a week or two, they throw on music that can be heard anywhere else, while they set up the station that won't include said new music once the permanent format is launched. They could have easily called it WWWN and kept playing alternative until they were ready to go. Want to purge the former audience, do it when you're ready.

I'll think of iHeart taking over WFNX in Boston. Same situation. The intellectual property of the station was retained by another owner, but iHeart allowed the station to still broadcast, until they were ready to launch their Jack-like station. None of this half-way stunting to purge the previous audience. What happened with Merlinn, and all stunting, I view as an assumption that they thought while playing Katy Perry, the audience would stick around after they stopped playing Katy Perry. I see that as an insult to the intelligence of the average listener.
 
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Stunting is done for several reasonable reasons. For technical reasons (You can't always just up and change format without making technical adjustments. A lot of that is done during stunting) In the case of FM News, they were building a newsroom where the reporters could record their reports and have them sent to the computer so only the anchors needed to be in the studio. When it launched, they had all of the anchors and reporters in the room at the same time taking turns. The studio was not ready. They should have stunted longer.

Other times if the format goes to another frequency, they stunt so people change the station.

Programming is usually scheduled ahead of time. If you just let go of the person who programs it, unless you're iHeart with generic logs, at some point you'll run out of scheduled programming. I know of one station where they relied on another station's log to operate. The other station flipped. The local PD had no clue how to program that format, and it just started playing all kinds of unusual music until they decided to flip that station too.
 
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