I remember the 2014 Napa Quake I happened to be in that area at the time. Prior to the 2014 quake there had been lots of attention directed to the Hayward Fault and how much the Bay Area is at risk for a 6.9 quake on that fault line. Note the 2014 Napa Earthquake that affected Napa to Vallejo warned us that there are other fault lines that pose the same threat and same probabilities besides Hayward and San Andreas faults. But then again it’s one of these cases where I’m not sure where radio is going to go the next time the disaster hits given its current state. Also where we are now the residents expect their cell phones to give warnings. Yes for verification/confirmation of that event I knew back then we expected all news radio like KCBS and KNX for that one. Today it’s different Social Media becomes the first place people will run to for that or AP and Reuters for that one but the information will have unconfirmed stuff until emergency services can fact check everything about the event.
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KNX Los Angeles and KCBS San Francisco to Simulcast Overnight Programming
- Thread starter Joey1986
- Start date
To respond to you. I don't want you to feel I'm ignoring you. I'm not.
When I think you're right I agree. I've done that with most of your posts.
Right back atcha. Facts are facts. Those who know the facts, use them. Those who don't, attack personality.
If anything I've said is wrong, feel free to correct me. Otherwise, stop wasting our time. (your time as well as mine)
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Not radio and TV. Essentially every station there has to have a generator, but if your tower was blown down, or the roof of your building blown off or the transmitter site flooded or wind blew water from the hurricane into your transmitter room, that had nothing to do with "the electric company".
The power authority, which has had a number of names over time, has always had infrastructure problems. They have an enormous administrative staff and not enough people in the field.
Wood power poles in the tropics deteriorate very fast, yet there was never a program to replace all of them with cement or metal posts or take cabling underground where possible.
The same applied for decades to landlines. When I first arrived in 1970, it took me about 4 months to get a phone in my apartment... even with the push of a radio station.
Overall, everything in government infrastructure is deficient... from bridges to electrical power.
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K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
To elaborate on that...
Is The U.S. Headed For A Power Grid Crisis?
America’s power grid faces rising demand, retiring baseload, and policy delays. Can utilities, investors, and tech solutions keep the lights on?
www.forbes.com
I've been told by folks who would know that KNX will originate the overnight broadcasts on weekends. The decision to have KCBS originate on weeknights was likely due to the union scale being lower in SF.
As much as I hate this kind of consolidation, with a loss of radio jobs and somewhat of a loss of some local stories, I can see this working for several reasons.
Fox on the West Coast runs a late program after local news called West Coast Wrap. The stations in San Diego don't run it, but it streams over the Fox Local plaform from Fox 11 in Los Angeles. I think it runs on all of the Fox O&Os in the West (LA, Oakland, Phoenix, Seattle, etc.). They have a main anchor, presumably in Los Angeles and all of the stations in the chain contribute the reporter stories. The weather is a regional forecast covering the cities in the area (not as detailed as a dedicated local report, but it does the job, especially since it probably just followed a local newscast that had more detailed weather). It probably is cheaper to run and covers the bigger stories from the region better than each local station could try to do outside of their viewing area.
A friend of mine used to be the OM for one of Salem's Christian Music and Teaching radio stations. Most of the programming came in to a server directly from Salem HQ and each station just downloaded the shows from the Internet and slotted them in where they wanted to schedule them. I could see a similar system being used by Audacy.
Since it just got started it has some bugs to be worked out, but I could see Audacy revamping the format to something like, as previously mentioned, California News Overnight without mention of the call letters (except for IDs as needed). They could even syndicate it to interested California News/Talk stations as a branded overnight news program to take the place of reruns of talk shows and filler programming. I could see both stations uploading their reports to a server, especially the later stories of the previous day that may not need immediate updates. Then the overnight show could just pull the reports all night as needed. Breaking news could be handled by the anchor on duty with update reports coming from both KCBS and KNX as needed. Traffic and Weather would probably not need to be as long, with each station having pads to have local traffic and weather within an allotted time (60 seconds? 30 seconds?) - those could be recorded and aired in each market separately to avoid confusion. There would be at least one engineer/broadcaster at the station that is not airing as the headend station, who could either do the short T&W update and/or break in as needed, as well as maybe do overnight editor jobs to send stories to the live originating station.
As iHeart has shown, news and other updates can be done from a regional level, and they can do a decent job of covering markets outside of their own, thanks to today's technology.
As far as music and elements, they could get a small music/liner package that could be common to both stations for the overnight program so as not to confuse KCBS music/elements on KNX and vice versa. Each station could continue to use their respective audio elements during all other hours.
Thoughts?
Fox on the West Coast runs a late program after local news called West Coast Wrap. The stations in San Diego don't run it, but it streams over the Fox Local plaform from Fox 11 in Los Angeles. I think it runs on all of the Fox O&Os in the West (LA, Oakland, Phoenix, Seattle, etc.). They have a main anchor, presumably in Los Angeles and all of the stations in the chain contribute the reporter stories. The weather is a regional forecast covering the cities in the area (not as detailed as a dedicated local report, but it does the job, especially since it probably just followed a local newscast that had more detailed weather). It probably is cheaper to run and covers the bigger stories from the region better than each local station could try to do outside of their viewing area.
A friend of mine used to be the OM for one of Salem's Christian Music and Teaching radio stations. Most of the programming came in to a server directly from Salem HQ and each station just downloaded the shows from the Internet and slotted them in where they wanted to schedule them. I could see a similar system being used by Audacy.
Since it just got started it has some bugs to be worked out, but I could see Audacy revamping the format to something like, as previously mentioned, California News Overnight without mention of the call letters (except for IDs as needed). They could even syndicate it to interested California News/Talk stations as a branded overnight news program to take the place of reruns of talk shows and filler programming. I could see both stations uploading their reports to a server, especially the later stories of the previous day that may not need immediate updates. Then the overnight show could just pull the reports all night as needed. Breaking news could be handled by the anchor on duty with update reports coming from both KCBS and KNX as needed. Traffic and Weather would probably not need to be as long, with each station having pads to have local traffic and weather within an allotted time (60 seconds? 30 seconds?) - those could be recorded and aired in each market separately to avoid confusion. There would be at least one engineer/broadcaster at the station that is not airing as the headend station, who could either do the short T&W update and/or break in as needed, as well as maybe do overnight editor jobs to send stories to the live originating station.
As iHeart has shown, news and other updates can be done from a regional level, and they can do a decent job of covering markets outside of their own, thanks to today's technology.
As far as music and elements, they could get a small music/liner package that could be common to both stations for the overnight program so as not to confuse KCBS music/elements on KNX and vice versa. Each station could continue to use their respective audio elements during all other hours.
Thoughts?
Sure. Where does the money come from? The reason KNX and KCBS are doing this is because there's no money in overnight radio.
It's so bad, there's no money even in syndicated overnight radio. Let's say you get 70 stations across the whole state carrying this. Still no money. The stations will want this for free.
I seem to remember there used to be a nightly half hour public radio show that covered all the state news. It may have come from KQED or an independent group in SF. They used reports from stations around the state. They got state funding to do it. Then the money dried up and the show went away.
Dumb question: If there's no money in overnight radio, why don't stations sign off at midnight like many stations did decades ago? Why pay an electric bill for a time period when they're not making enough (or any whatsoever) money to cover their costs?
It costs more to power down and power back up. Just leave it on with some form of automation. It's not like there's no audience. There are daytime stations that have to sign off and sign back on. It takes a while to build up that morning audience from zero.
OK. I thought that even being in separate countries they had to sorta coordinate with each other to avoid interference didn't realize Canada would have had preference.
I can understand that if a station is still using an ancient tube transmitter and have to warm up the filaments first thing in the morning, but I thought modern solid state equipment didn't have those problems. Don't these transmitters have some kind of standby mode where they may not power down completely, but wouldn't be actually broadcasting a signal during these "off" times?
This question comes up a lot. A number of people have posted here that the electricity bill for running a solid state transmitter for a few hours a night is negligible. But as I said, that has nothing to do with the fact that it's harder to attract an audience from zero than it is to add to a small audience that's still there. People aren't going to wait around for 5 AM to turn their radios on and listen. People tune in and out on their schedule, not the radio's schedule. If there's nothing there, they go someplace else. So it's easier to just leave the transmitter on with programming that has little or no cost. That's what these stations are trying to do.
I haven't seen anything, anywhere, about KNX's two veteran overnight anchors Bob Brill and Art Sanders. Presumably one will handle the weekend overnight shifts originating from KNX. I swear I heard Art voice a story during AM drive this morning and didn't think anything of it as he often would record a story and leave it behind to fill out the AM newscast.
This is the move. If you're going to run a combined overnight newscast, it needs to be branded as a generic cast that doesn't sound out of place on either station.
The last 3 or 4 years we've been getting reports of statewide interest from KCBS reporters on KNX with a KNX lockout. Presumably KCBS has been getting similar KNX reports with a KCBS lock out.
The management teams are now unified. The traffic anchors from 9PM-5AM have covered both markets (I'm surprised reading reports in this thread of the traffic anchors tripping up over the SoCal Freeways) for a year or so.
This is fine. The audience is small, the billing smaller. Make it generic and make it work.
A transmitter is sorta' like a TV set... a bunch of electronics in a box. It costs nothing to turn it on or off.
I learned back in the vacuum tube days that the roughest thing on a transmitter was turning it on in the morning. It had cooled off during the night, moisture might have condensed in it... heck, a rat might have gone to sleep over a still warm transformer or choke. Turn it on, and it shorts or the relay sticks or the rat short circuits the whole thing.
You miss morning drive. Great.
Many stations shut down at midnight back before equipment rapidly became more reliable in the 60's. But by then, the gear worked more reliably and no matter when someone had to work late or get up early, you were there for them. It made sense to stay on.
By 1966, I had 5 stations in Quito alone, all 24/7. No other station in the country was on 24 hours, so I had 100% of the audience. And I felt that catching occasional overnight listeners kept them with me the next day. Worth it.
Today, it is so reliable you can put a transmitter on a hilltop in Canada that can be snowed in for weeks and never worry.... just run it 24 hours a day.
Or, before revenue was so tight, put a trainee on the board and let them learn the ropes. I had an apprentice who was my overnight guy at KWIZ in Santa Ana around 1993. He talked too much, but he started developing. When we had to let our morning guy go, the overnighter, Eddie Sotelo, became "Piolín" and later was #1 over all stations in LA in AM drive.
There is audience... again, using personal experience, my overnight guy in the later 90's at KTNQ got higher Arbitron AQH average persons than the every station below #15 in LA in daytime hours. It's there, and it responds to interesting radio.
That's not true. New designs have made AM transmitter much more efficient... it used to be that a 5 kw transmitter in the tube era would use about 10 to 12 kw hours of electricity. Today, it is more like 7 to 8 kw hours with enhanced modulation techniques and less AC and cooling. FM transmitters, too, are more efficient with solid state, but most of the difference is in the cost of cooling the transmitter and cooling the transmitter building when the weather is warm.
And with today's electricity costs, running any transmitter can be expensive. Think of it this way... transmitters are not 100% efficient. So the get one watt out, an AM transmitter and cooling may use up to 2 watts of power, and an FM today about a watt and a half.
That is a good point. It's better to be there for listeners all the time, so that they never leave the radio on a different station.
The reason why I don't understand operations like the Pacifica stations is that it is so hard to tell what is on at any given time.... and if you tune in at random, chances are that you will hear something you don't like. Consistent formats, 24/7 are all the more critical in the internet age where seekers of specific content or music know exactly where to find it at all hours of the day.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
The reason Canada has preference in that situation is that the coordination is part of the North American Regional Broadcsting Agreement (NARBA) which is the end result of several treaties, the earliest going back to 1937. Among other things specified, it has a table of which AM frequencies are designated for "clear channel" use by each signatory. The Wikipedia page on NARBA includes a table of the AM frequencies, and you can clearly see that 740 is designated as a Canadian clear.
And you will also note that the assignment of 740 has now been in place for over 84 years and that 1070 was a "shared clear" with the now-silent CBA in New Brunswick.
Hope that clears up any confusion for you!