LA_Guy said:
Instead of becoming a third tier englsh talker, featuring a has been "Dr". Laura as their headliner, they should have become the FIRST hispanic news/talker in LA.
I think they blew it.
The first Spanish language talker was the 830 facility in Orange, which failed and had to be sold, in the early 90's.
The second was KTNQ, which achived very significant ratings, even tying KFI in 25-54. All programming was local, as there is no usable syndicated material in Spanish.
The third was KWKW, which copied much of the KTNQ formula. It ended up doing all sports and infomercials.
The fourth was KHJ, which did all news against KTNQ. It never got above about a 0.6 share.
And then the fifth was KBLA, as an affiliate of Radio Unica, the national net out of Miami that tried, and failed horribly and expensively, to do national talk.
The sixth was also on 830, with RadioVisa, another effort to do national talk. They lost a lot of money for some investors, and never got beyond the 1 share range.
In the meantime, KTNQ which had been in the 2.5 to 3.0 range 12+ and above a 3 in 25-54, was fragmented by this group of pretenders to the throne. The expenses of doing a full local live talk format were so high that KTNQ gave up at the end of 2001 and went to a simulcast with KRCD for several years.
KHJ lasted less than two years with news in AM and PM drive, talk in middays and nights, and KWKW as mentioned moved to all sports and paid programming. Radio Visa and Radio Unica went bankrupt.
The seventh one is more recent: W Radio 690, with studios in Burbank. It uses a lot of syndicated stuff out of Mexico, and has, for nearly 3 years, never gotten much over a 0.3 share.
So, out of seven tries, only one station got decent ratings. But the costs were so high, it was not profitable.
Talk in Spanish is not an option for CBS, anyway. The format is so culturally sensitive that it would be very hard to do without background and experience, and, today, AM has fallen so out of favor by Hispanics that getting the kind of share seen nearly 15 years ago by KTNQ would be nearly impossible.