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Kday

3

32james

just wondering when KDAY is going off the air, its been awhile and im sad its going to Asian programming, when 93.5 FM did this back in the mid 90's, its ratings tanked, these new people should realize this format works in the Inland Empire and keep it there at least, does not do well at all in LA, but at least keep it going in the IE, at least. :), by the way, back in the 90's it was korean programming, not much different in terms of a very small audience.
 
32james said:
just wondering when KDAY is going off the air, its been awhile and im sad its going to Asian programming, when 93.5 FM did this back in the mid 90's, its ratings tanked, these new people should realize this format works in the Inland Empire and keep it there at least, does not do well at all in LA, but at least keep it going in the IE, at least. :), by the way, back in the 90's it was korean programming, not much different in terms of a very small audience.
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With operations such as the proposed new programming on KDAY, ratings are not a crucial or even relevant part of the business model.

It is quite obvious that Arbitron does not (and can not) do a good job measuring the audience of speakers of Asian languages. Yet there are huge communities in the LA metro that speak Korean, the various dialects of Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Japanese and others. There are also communities that speak Persian, Armenian, Russian, Arabic and other non-Asian languages.

As long as those communities have businesses and commerce, and can sustain the lesser-signal radio stations in the market, we will have radio stations jumping at the chance to serve those communities.

If you look at the success of KAZN, KYPA, KMPC, KIRN, KVNR and other stations in languages not part of Arbitron's recruiting efforts, you can see that these "stations without ratings" are very successful and very profitable for the most part.
 
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Asian programming is one thing, but selling an American radio license to a company with direct ties to the Chinese government is quite another, and this sale should be denied on those grounds.
 
David, how many English-language stations have changed formats to Spanish, Korean, Chinese or Persian and then eventually gone back to English-language programming? Audience size may be greatly underestimated by Arbitron but I can't think of very many foreign-language stations that have failed to attract a large enough audience to support the format. Even in cities with ten or more Spanish-language stations and/or three or more Asian stations, the stations all seem to do well.
 
Dave Atonement said:
Asian programming is one thing, but selling an American radio license to a company with direct ties to the Chinese government is quite another, and this sale should be denied on those grounds.
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Won't happen, we do too much business with China, they have and will continue to get away with everything
 
LARadioRewind said:
David, how many English-language stations have changed formats to Spanish, Korean, Chinese or Persian and then eventually gone back to English-language programming?
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Not many. There are at least two I can think of:

a. KZLA-1540 in Los Angeles. Was a country station in the early 80s, then switched to Spanish for before becoming an English-language sports talk station in the late 90s. (I can get the exact years from the radio history site, if needed).

b. KTRO-1520 in Ventura. Was Spanish (Radio Tiro, playing a gunshot sound effect -- "tiro" is Spanish for gunshot) for years, but switched to English talk in the last decade or so...
 
The 1540 station was the only one I could think of that went from English to Spanish to English.....and it gets bonus points for switching again, to Korean. It was originally KPOL, then KZLA, then switched to Spanish-language in 1984 and went through three sets of call letters before becoming "One On One Sports" KCTD in 1997. Now the station is a Radio Korea outlet and has the legendary KMPC call letters which belonged to 710 AM from 1930 to 1997. What would Gene Autry have said if he had heard the call letters of "The Station Of The Stars" call letters being used on a Korean station?
 
radiocph said:
Not many. There are at least two I can think of:

a. KZLA-1540 in Los Angeles. Was a country station in the early 80s, then switched to Spanish for before becoming an English-language sports talk station in the late 90s. (I can get the exact years from the radio history site, if needed).

b. KTRO-1520 in Ventura. Was Spanish (Radio Tiro, playing a gunshot sound effect -- "tiro" is Spanish for gunshot) for years, but switched to English talk in the last decade or so...
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Generally, many stations go to non-English ethnic formats when their signal... or their band... can no longer compete with the general market FM signals.

For many, this is a good alternative.

However, in the case of Spanish language, AMs, particularly those with bad signals, can't compete.

Just as African American targeted programming migrated to FM decades ago, Spanish language programming has moved to FM except in markets with too small a population to sustain a higher-valued facility. Hispanics use even less AM than non-Hispanic whites for a variety of reasons... so in competitive markets with plenty of FM Spanish language signals, we have seen AM Spanish stations disappear. Fresno, Bakersfield, San Francisco / San Jose, San Diego, LA, Ventura, the IE are some of the markets just in CA where Spanish language AMs have changed format.

Even in LA, signals like 1430, 1480, 1540, 1510, 1090 (yeah, not really LA) and 830 have migrated to other formats... English on 830 and 1090, Asian languages on several of the others.

With those marginal signals, a lot of the "language" decision has to do with who owns the station. A sale will often bring a new format or language, such as 1170 or 1430 in San José.

KMPC (the original KPOL (AM) became KSKQ in 1984, and KXED around 1992 (August, I believe) and remained Spanish until SBS sold it to Sporting News Radio in mid-1997 in an effort to reduce debt.
 
RBC Communications was planning to buy KDAY for $19.5 million but they pulled out of the deal. Worried that KDAY will still be sold, the people behind the "Save KDAY" Facebook page are trying to raise $10 million to save the station. That's a difference of $9.5 million. Did Magic Broadcasting decide to have a "half-off" sale? :)

https://www.facebook.com/SaveKday
 
Growing up I remember KMPC as "Seven-Ten Talk K-M-P-C".

DavidEduardo, speaking of ratings-less stations, how is listenership quantified for non-profit / religious / etc stations, like KECR and KFRN? (I remember hearing someone on Family Radio specifically say they don't seek "ratings" or something like that.) Of course neither of them have the signal reach that a station like KFI has (although I can hear KFRN on a good radio in southeast San Diego county, and in the high desert along CA-58).

Speaking of Spanish AMs, there are still quite a few I receive from south of the border. Also 1130 KSDO runs Radio Nueva Vida, a Spanish religious format, right? If Spanish on AM is dying, what should I expect to happen to those signals in the future? I do remember you saying there isn't room to move them to FM. So even if the feds assumed that people would use radios as selective as my Tecsun DSP radios, which separate first-adjacents on FM with ease as long as they're not using IBOC, would there still not be room - not even if you could have first-adjacents in the same market?
 
Two days ago I asked Don Barrett why LARadio.com hadn't mentioned anything about the collapse of RBC Communications' deal to buy KDAY. He replied that former KDAY co-owner Don McCoy told him that the deal is still pending.
 
Mr. Venta has updated his earlier post (again, at http://radioinsight.com/blog/headlines/85281/kday-sale-falls-through) to note that RBC's lawyers have notified the FCC that the agreement has been terminated. The official letter (which is linked from the post) is apparently from late September; perhaps the partial shutdown resulted in it not being made public until now.
 
This appeared on LARadio.com on October 24: "RBC Communications, Inc. has given notice to KDAY that RBC has terminated the asset purchase agreement relating to the assignment and requested that the FCC dismiss the application." Don'tcha love lawyer-speak? They couldn't just say "purchase"; No, they had to say "the asset purchase agreement relating to the assignment."
 
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