Norm Rosen said:
As far as the cost of hiring and maintaining a 24 hour news staff goes, CBS doesn't need you all, or anyone else to do their expenses on this site.
CBS honchos will do whatever the F$^K they want no matter what I, or Scott, or Bob, or any other nostalgic cheerleader says.
I'll gladly cop to being a student of WBZ's history. I don't think that makes me a "nostalgic cheerleader." I have tremendous respect for the WBZ of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, but I don't for one minute believe that recreating the station of DeSuze and Maynard and Glick is a sure-fire recipe for success in the 2012 media landscape. Nor do I believe, having talked to many of the players who were there in those days, that the basic motivation behind station management was any different then: Westinghouse, like CBS Radio, was a very large company with the bottom line always very clearly in view.
That means that, despite your contention, CBS honchos can't just "do whatever the F$^K they want." They have to answer the very questions that you so quickly brushed off as not our concern here: will switching to more expensive programming increase ratings and revenues, and conversely, can programming be cheapened without causing a disproportionate loss in ratings and revenue?
On plenty of occasions, the 20/20 hindsight of history tells us their analysis was wrong. Sure, it was a lot cheaper to run Tom Snyder than Brudnoy, and to run Jon Grayson instead of Leveille, but it turned out that the fall-off in advertising revenues was unacceptably large, too. The bottom line spoke, and management had to listen. (The bottom line also turned out to dictate that the tradeoff for continued local talk at night was apparently infomercials on the weekends. The jury may still be out on the long-term effect of that decision.)
CBS and Merlin have enough money to start up news operations in other cities, One of them is Philadelphia, and what I propose now, and I'll repeat it again if I have to, is for either Merlin to come to Boston and purchase an FM for ALL NEWS, or WBZ to feature ALL NEWS, live and local on one of their existing under- performing FM's, and silmulcast WBZ AM during the day.
Every city has a glut of talkers, for example WABC,WMAL, KNEW, WLS, WGN, KFI,WPHT should I go on?
However, every one of those cities has ALL NEWS station/s to fall back on when their eyes glaze over, Boston does not.
All good in theory. But any "serious discussion" has to take into account that not all markets, and not all broadcast companies, are created equal.
If CBS were starting from a blank slate in each of its markets, it would never have two competing all-newsers in New York, for instance. But WINS and WCBS don't exist in a vacuum; they exist in a real and unique media market that's very heavily shaped by the three decades of stiff competition between Group W and CBS that preceded the merger in the 1990s. Out of that battle emerged two very strong radio stations with distinct audience profiles and mammoth revenue streams, and in that specific environment it made all the sense in the world to keep them both.
In Philadelphia, CBS inherited a Group W all-newser, KYW, that was truly 24/7 news...and that had built a 30-year legacy of 24/7 news by the time of the merger. It's hard to imagine what else KYW might have done,
in the context of its specific scenario, that would have made more sense than remaining 24/7 news.
If you roll the clock back half a century to the dawn of the Group W all-news formula, could they have made WBZ into the same sort of 24/7 operation that KYW is? It's certainly possible - but it helps immensely to understand why KYW went in one direction in 1965 and WBZ went another way. KYW actually
was a blank slate when it went all-news: Westinghouse had just won back the Philadelphia signal after a long legal battle with NBC, and NBC uprooted the programming it had been running in Philadelphia (as WRCV) and moved much of its staff to Cleveland. So the risk-reward equation looked pretty good in Philadelphia. But in Boston, WBZ was riding high with its full-service format, heavy on music, and the potential disruption from a conversion to all-news was too much risk for Westinghouse to take. By the time circumstances all but demanded all-news during the day, there was far too much full-service history baked into WBZ's DNA...and thus the hybrid format that spawned this thread.
(And it should be noted that some of Westinghouse's attempts to do all-news have failed. WIND in Chicago got slaughtered by WBBM, a later stab with WMAQ didn't survive the CBS merger, and even KFWB lost out in the end to the stronger KNX.)
That's a long way around to get to your proposed scenarios, which, again, look good against a blank slate but maybe not so much against the unique reality of Boston in 2012.
CBS has no underperforming FMs to blow up. The investment in 98.5, which is not a cheap station to run, has paid off very nicely. Sports talk draws a demographic that's very desirable to advertisers, out of proportion to what the overall 12+ ratings would suggest, and WBZ-FM gets to bank that revenue without the huge burden of baseball rights fees that drags down WEEI's profitability. (And 98.5 got lucky, too: the spreadsheets couldn't have predicted that the Bruins would be hoisting the Stanley Cup and the Pats would be in the Super Bowl within the station's first couple of years on the air.)
WBMX and WODS provide a female demographic that CBS otherwise doesn't have in its portfolio, and WZLX owns most of what's left of the older rock audience that was once split among WZLX, WBCN, the old 93.7, etc.
So it's back to the bottom line: if you lose the profit you now derive from an inexpensive, high-revenue FM music format, can you make up for that with increased revenue from an FM all-news format...and in this case, balanced not only against the high expenses of that format but also against the potential cannibalization of revenue from a very profitable AM station?
That's a more complex bit of calculus than just giving listeners something "to fall back on when their eyes glaze over."
As for Merlin, it would need to have an FM to buy. In Chicago and New York, Emmis' financial problems made signals available. In Philadelphia, Family Stations was selling. In Boston, everything's locked up in solid clusters. CBS, obviously, isn't selling. Greater Media is doing just fine with its signals and has no incentive to peel one of them off for sale. Clear Channel's not a seller. Entercom's definitely not a seller. The remaining singletons (WXRV, WPLM, WBOQ) are so far from full-market that they'd make no sense as all-newsers, even if they were for sale. (Which they're not.)
Nothing in radio happens in a vacuum. You very rarely get a blank slate. Each market is unique. Each market's history is unique.
