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March 2023 Bay Area Radio PPM Ratings
- Thread starter HenryOchs
- Start date
Just found out that Cali doesn’t allow sports betting when I tried to place a bet from my hotel in SF. Ugh.
You can bet on horse races but no other sports. So why the long face?
I don't care what's on a radio station I don't listen to. And I'm really straining to come up with a format and a level of excellence that would make me listen to AM.
You are not alone... about 90% of adult Americans agree.
I mean, there was a time when KCBS, if it wasn't simulcast on FM, would have made that list, but the quality of the product under Audacy is nothing like it was seven or eight years ago.
It is nothing short of astonishing how Audacy is wrecking KCBS. Virtually all the legacy news anchors and street reporters have left, "retired" or been shown the door. The people who've filled their shoes have come from (a) former talk station KGO, (b) former AAA KFOG, (c) jazz station KCSM, (d) KGO-TV ("ABC7") news, (e) KPIX ("CBS5") news, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few other "misfits". (Not claiming these individuals are misfits as people, just that they're not (IMO) well suited to anchoring at a legacy all-news station.)
I hear some of the same problems when I tune into (when I'm back east) or stream their NYC sister, WCBS. Used to be a truly class act, now being dismantled, brick by brick, by Audacy, as the resources are not-so-subtly redirected into 1010 WINS.
Unlike a certain blogger who shall go unnamed, I don't pin all the blame on their PD/ND, who I suspect is under intolerable budget pressures. Same with her NYC equivalent. And probably the NDs at WBBM, KNX and the others in that stable. Very sad.
I read this a lot. People get old. When they get old, they start thinking about other things they want to do while they still have time. Not everyone wants to work until they drop dead. A lot of these 'legacy' people are in their 70s. You may miss them, but try to understand that to them, it's a job. At some point they might want to retire and sleep late or play with their grandchildren. Being on the radio is not meant to be a job for life. You may blame Audacy or other companies, but a lot of these people are getting great severance packages and the option to work part time. That leaves them time to start living a life for the first time.
I know! I keep wondering when Audacy does something similar to what they did to KDWN and announce that they'll end broadcasting on 740 (no time soon, I hope).
I agree. I've been listening to KCBS fairly regularly since at least 2004 or so (back when they still called themselves "all news 74"), and I'm dismayed by how the quality of the format seems to have suffered since it was first a "Radio.com" and now an Audacy station.
I don't blame the on-air talent at all, and retirements are normal and OK with me (although it is always sad when another long time voice says goodbye), even the quality of the news they cover isn't necessarily that bad, but the overall sound of the format is feeling a bit cheaper, and leaning more heavily on ads and self promotions of Audacy's various online services, and relying on a very small crew of on-location reporters (like two or three now?) more than before.
The traffic reports are still decent, but they seem to be relying primarily on call-ins and Twitter (which, up until recently, wasn't terrible I suppose) whereas in the not to distant past, they'd get out their helicopter (and I think they also had a dedicated crew of people who would simply drive around and report on conditions on the ground directly) and report first hand info. I get that much of this was scaled back due to better technology, excessively high costs, etc., but it does seem to have compromised their quality a bit.
Weather reports are pretty good usually (for the :18 and :48 6 day forecast, they air segments, usually prerecorded, but sometimes live, featuring meteorologists from CBS-TV (KPIX 5), which is nothing new (that's been done since at least the 90s I think).
I would say that much of this cheapening happened post-COVID, so it is likely a result of Audacy's severely reduced revenues, which seems to be pretty much irreversible (I'd love to be proven wrong!).
As for their AM feed (the venerable signal on 740), the quality has gone downhill over the past couple of years. I've noticed, at various times, distortion and dropouts that sound kind of like some kind of equipment failure, and on a couple occasions, extended periods of dead air.
I still listen because it's one of the better options around here (and pretty much the only one on AM, at least in the daytime; at night, the increasingly similar sounding KNX comes in from LA, and when it comes to national and international news, they seem to come from a slightly different angle, which can be refreshing sometimes).
c
It's not just Audacy's reduced revenue. Everyone has taken a hit, with revenues down and costs going up because of inflation. The question is: How to improve revenue without adding to the commercial load? Ideas?
Look, it's not like we don't, for the most part, understand why this is happening. As David's pointed out a bunch of times, revenues are down somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% over the last two decades (on an inflation-adjusted basis). Expenses of course go up with inflation and supply-demand. People want their income to at least stay flat, if not increase, rather than erode with inflation. And anyone who is in their 60's or 70's -- and that includes myself -- feels the tug of time and has seen friends and family succumb to age and illness, especially after our war with COVID. Lots of casualties, lots of victims, more than a few we each knew or knew of. None of that should be a blinding revelation.
But a business needs to invest in their future if they want there to be a future. Audacy has cheapened the product in many ways, and it's become quite noticeable with the all-news stations. Unlike with music formats, there's not much place to hide. Replacing veteran anchors and street reporters with newbies should be happening organically, slowly, as should retirements. At minimum, the vets need to be mentors to the newbies so the quality doesn't erode. But when it's happened so fast that it's painfully obvious to even casual listeners that the product's been cheapened, then management has failed. And adding a little to commercial load is generally going to be invisible, but there comes a point where even those casual listeners start to realize that most of what they're hearing is ads, not content, and they *will* decide they have better uses for their time than listening to the tax guy, or the pavers guy, or the Kars4Kids folks every half hour. So far the ratings don't show serious erosion here in SFBA, but it will catch up to Audacy. In the money demos, I think it already has.
I may not have the answer, but I know what it's not. And it's not what they're doing. Unless their goal is to Chapter 7 the company and pick up the pieces they want in BK court for cheap, blowing away all the other shareholders in the process. Wouldn't be the first time.
You can't "invest in the future" by losing money on heritage platforms that are no longer being supported by auto makers and electronics manufacturers. The radio industry is investing in other platforms, not AM & FM. In order to do that, they're replacing on-air people with multi-platform content creators. So a day will come when 740 goes away completely. No amount of investment by Audacy or anyone will change that. That's what "investing in the future" means. It doesn't mean doing things the way they've been done for 50 years.
It may seem to you that they've "cheapened the product," but they've given raises to all the writers, producers, and announcers who create that product. That doesn't make it cheaper, but more expensive. You just don't get the bill for how much more it costs to get what you hear. Instead, it becomes looking a gift horse in the mouth, wanting them to spend more on free services for you while complaining about their only source of revenue.
I recently found a recording of 6 hours of KCBS from June 2, 2000. This was the day Al Hart retired. Of course, he was very much the voice of the station and nearly impossible to replace. But other, less obvious things struck me as well:
1) The near-total absence of flubs. There were two at most in that entire time.
2) The recording started at 4 am, with Larry Chiaroni as the anchor. The pacing and the quality of writing and anchoring would have stood up just as well at 4 pm. KCBS was putting out a quality product around the clock then.
3) There were multiple bureaus with dedicated reporters: San Francisco City Hall (Barbara Taylor, naturally!), Alameda County, Marin County, San Jose.
4) There was a better level of advertiser: no tax resolution outfits (except for one spot from Steve Moskowitz - Steve Moskowitz is forever, it seems), no "male medical" spots, very few 1-800 p/i spots, and so on.
That last item is the key: a declining quality of advertiser ultimately results in a declining quality of programming.
The writing on KCBS has gotten awful, but that's also true of most of the local TV stations.
It was CBS that ditched the traffic helicopters on KCBS. That's not to say that Audacy would have kept them if KCBS still had them when the purchase went through.
There's another factor: the demographics of the staff. There was a big surge in the early 1970s when the leading edge of the bay boom graduated from J-schools, speech programs, etc. (or in some cases, just going right from high school, but much less so on the news side). Broadcast stations still had requirements for news and public-affairs programming, and, in TV, there was a particularly notable increase in staffing. Graduates from the later part of the 1970s had a tougher time finding jobs, because all those new roles were already taken, and because the push to deregulate was just starting. So all those grads from, let's say, 1970-1976 are now past 65 and ready to retire. There are fewer "less old" (I hesitate to say "younger") people to take their places because, instead of a smooth progression of hiring over time, a whole bunch of people were hired all at once and now they're ready to retire all at once. This can be notable in TV - look at the turnover KTVU has had - but particularly stark in radio. Moreover, jobs in radio news shrank in the 1980s. It was evident to just about any young person looking to enter the field at the time that it would be tough. A few did it anyway, but I'd be willing to wager that far more just said, screw it, I'll do something else where I don't have to live on macaroni and cheese in a small market for years because my salary wouldn't cover basic living expenses. (Or words to that effect.) So the talent pool became shallower and shallower, and incumbents stayed put. Now that those incumbents have been retiring, there's not that much talent there to replace them. Radio stations failed to develop news talent and, at least for the few stations where that still matters, it's come back to bite them.
That's a key phrase: incumbents stayed put. You could say that about every aspect of radio. People got hired out of college, and stayed put. When that happens, how does a station develop new talent? There's no place to put them. Look at what happened at KFOG and KGO. How do you build a new generation of stars when the previous generation won't get out of the way? Then one day you bring in a new voice, and the audience still wants their old friends. They resent it when you cycle in someone new.
As I have said on other threads it's sad that what was once one of the finest and balanced talk stations in the country has changed formats and is literally now in the ratings toilet (whether they need ratings or not).
It was a very long and expensive ride to the bottom. And there are hundreds of similar AM stations all around the country that went into the same toilet.
There's more to it than that - and I'll admit that I didn't say everything I could have said in that first post. Even so, I have to think about what broadcasting (radio and TV) were like in the late 1960s - when, at least as a listener, there seemed to be multiple possibilities - and now, when it seems to be in decline.
How did broadcasting make room for more people? By finding new markets and serving them. By having a program to develop talent (to be honest, most broadcasters were lousy at this - I saw very little mentoring - of anyone, not just myself - when I was in broadcasting). By having people get their start in timeslots where they could make mistakes, get feedback, and develop. s for finding new markets, this would require some new ideas. At least in English-language formats, I think there have been no new ideas in 40 years, just tweaks of existing ones. I can't speak to most Spanish-language formats so perhaps there has been some innovation there, but I just don't know. But, full disclosure here, my perspective is from that of someone who mostly was a reporter and anchor. News and news/talk formats are what I knew best; I tend to stay away from most music-format discussions because I am very much out of my depth there most of the time. In any event, with lack of innovation, lumpy age demographics, and financial challenges, no wonder you're seeing the personnel changes that you've been seeing, at KCBS and other similarly situated stations.
I believe the 740 transmitter site is either in a flood plain, or pretty close to one. That land is not likely to be developed any time soon. The AM also gives KCBS some South Bay coverage where the 106.9 coverage is spotty.
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