Magic 100 (WJRZ)if it changed format? What format would you put you on the air?

[Jersey Joe]

Jazz, Sports Talk, or Conservative Political Talk all appeal to audiences that are too narrow for the local business model that stations like WJRZ work with.

They need a format that appeals broadly to the most potential listeners in their service area, and they have a special situation in that their sellable potential audience grows substantially during the summer months when all those beach houses are fully occupied, and loads of day trippers come into the area and listen in their cars and on the beach.

Jazz only works where it can carve out a slice of a big population area with many other choices on the dial. Both Sports Talk and Conservative Political talk are formats that mostly attract men, and Conservative talk has the aging audience problem too. Those talk formats would be better placed on AM stations that nobody knows what else to do with.

FMs have the potential of reaching much bigger slices of the potential audience pie than that, and that potential shouldn't be written off with a narrow appeal format.

More and more talk formats have started to move to the FM dial over the last few years. The problem with putting Sports talk or Conservative talk on an AM station down the shore is that NONE of the local AM stations have a stong enough bandwidth to be heard outside of 15 milles of their base location..and that is in the daytime. At night it goes down to 10 miles at best on a crystal clear night. :-[

 

[TimeIsTight]

You're absolutely right about talk formats moving over to FM in many markets. But that is usually happening in both big and small markets where there are a lot of available local FM channels, and in medium and small markets where there is not a lot of diversity in the population. We're talking about places where there isn't a need for an "urban" station, or Spanish language stations either. In those situations there may be FM channels that wouldn't be more profitable doing something other than talk. And sometimes, a cluster owner can afford to let one of its other stations pick up the potential listeners not interested in talk formats when it switches on station to talk.

However, in the lower Ocean area there really isn't a surplus of available local channels, and Greater Media is running solo while its two big local competitors, Millennium and Press, have multiple stations. And WFPG, probably draws Adult Contemporary listeners in Southern Ocean too.

If Greater Media were to pick a format like Sports or Political Talk, it would be limiting its advertising sales and ratings to a mostly male audience and ceding the female audience to its competitors, and in the case of political talk giving up on the male under-45 audience too. In a small local market, that is probably not a wise thing to do with a stand alone station. It automatically writes off a lot of potential advertisers who are most interested in women listeners, and younger consumers in general.