KGO fanboys have been loud and persistent - which, to some observers, covered up the fact that it had a 55-to-death demographic problem even before ABC sold it.
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March 2023 Bay Area Radio PPM Ratings
- Thread starter HenryOchs
- Start date
I'm going to stick up for today's News Radio stations. Do they sound like they did 20, 30 or 40 years ago? No. But I don't think we'd want our anchors to sound like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow in our modern times.
On You Tube, you can hear segments of CBS All-News stations from the 1970s and 80s. I respect what they were doing in those days. But it was formal and stuffy. The anchors were remote. No personality or flair, except for maybe the morning dual anchors. Stories were often long. Actualities, if available, were often long. Sometimes they'd go several minutes with only the anchor reading copy.
The voices were very good. Maybe too good. Yes, rarely did you hear a flub. But rarely did you hear a woman or a minority.
Maybe some of us are looking at the past with rose-colored glasses?
On You Tube, you can hear segments of CBS All-News stations from the 1970s and 80s. I respect what they were doing in those days. But it was formal and stuffy. The anchors were remote. No personality or flair, except for maybe the morning dual anchors. Stories were often long. Actualities, if available, were often long. Sometimes they'd go several minutes with only the anchor reading copy.
The voices were very good. Maybe too good. Yes, rarely did you hear a flub. But rarely did you hear a woman or a minority.
Maybe some of us are looking at the past with rose-colored glasses?
What happens is they get a job in San Francisco, discover how much they love the city, then get married, raise their kids there, and they don't want to leave. I've seen it in lots of places. So there's no room for new blood.
I agree. What I saw was the opposite. People got territorial about their job and didn't want to train their replacement.
And the heritage audience hates it. They want things to stay the same. They can't.
KCBS makes it down here with a pretty good signal. into the Monterey Bay area. At night though it seems there is some phase distortion. Perhaps groundwave and skip?
Of course 106.9 is non existent to full of multipath.
Monterey is about the right distance for skywave cancellation. It's caused by the ground and sky waves to arrive at slightly different times do the skywave path being a bit longer than the other. This causes phase cancellation in the audio.
From the perspective of 52 years in broadcasting and still on the air, doing news (at the NPR member station in Sacramento):
Smaller market training grounds dried up in the 80s and 90s. Both stations I worked at in Bishop (population 3,000 1971-74 and 1975-76) had a local news person.
At KIBS it was an experienced guy who'd worked at a smaller station in L.A. after the war, then moved his young family to the High Sierra in the mid-50s. If he got sick, it fell to one of the jocks, which is how I, at 16, wound up asking questions of then-Governor Ronald Reagan about plans to build a highway through the Sierra linking Fresno and Mammoth Lakes (fortunately, he was opposed).
At KIOQ, we hired young people fresh out of Journalism school. They tended to move on at the first opportunity, but that usually coincided with a new batch of grads looking for the door to put their foot in.
In Ukiah (population 10,000 1976-77) and Reno (population 200,000 1977-81), both KUKI and KOLO had two-person news staffs. I don't really remember the background of the Ukiah folks, but I'm betting they'd done at least a year or two in an even smaller town before landing at KUKI. They were quite good.
When I got to KOLO, the ND was a guy named Don Shafer. Total pro. No idea what his background was, but about 90 days after I got there, he went to KCBS. Before long, he was Executive Producer at KRON-TV in San Francisco and I think became Assistant ND before going on to be ND at a TV station in a smaller market. Lost track of him, but I know he was ND in Denver in the 80s for a long stretch and San Diego 10 or so years ago.
His #2, a woman he'd hired straight out of Stanford, hired a guy who'd been working for Ron Jacobs at KPOI in Honolulu...so he had his stuff together. A couple of years later, he went to the CBS-TV affiliate in Reno, I got his job in the KOLO newsroom, and eight months later, I followed him over to Channel 2.
At that time, every radio station in Reno (7 AM, 7 FM) had some news commitment that involved one or more people working as reporters and anchors.
Stan Bunger---the guy who replaced Al Hart in mornings at KCBS in 2000---was working at a South Lake Tahoe station when I was at KOLO (we never met then, but I heard him on the air). And he'd worked at stations in King City and Sonora before he got the Tahoe gig. He did Sacramento and San Jose after that. That's 25 years of experience before he started mornings at KCBS---where he reported for 18 years before they chose him to succeed Al.
The ladders that Stan and I climbed (he went considerably higher than I did) aren't there anymore, with the possible exception of the one common entry on both our resumes, KFBK. Though that's not the same gig as it used to be, either.
Today, hundreds of small-to-medium market radio news gigs where you could make your mistakes and polish your craft are gone. The really small places do local news (and it's often the owner or GM doing it), and after that, with very few exceptions, there's public radio and the big stations like KCBS. It's a huge issue and I don't envy Jen Seelig (KCBS' ND) having to navigate it whenever she has an opening.
Smaller market training grounds dried up in the 80s and 90s. Both stations I worked at in Bishop (population 3,000 1971-74 and 1975-76) had a local news person.
At KIBS it was an experienced guy who'd worked at a smaller station in L.A. after the war, then moved his young family to the High Sierra in the mid-50s. If he got sick, it fell to one of the jocks, which is how I, at 16, wound up asking questions of then-Governor Ronald Reagan about plans to build a highway through the Sierra linking Fresno and Mammoth Lakes (fortunately, he was opposed).
At KIOQ, we hired young people fresh out of Journalism school. They tended to move on at the first opportunity, but that usually coincided with a new batch of grads looking for the door to put their foot in.
In Ukiah (population 10,000 1976-77) and Reno (population 200,000 1977-81), both KUKI and KOLO had two-person news staffs. I don't really remember the background of the Ukiah folks, but I'm betting they'd done at least a year or two in an even smaller town before landing at KUKI. They were quite good.
When I got to KOLO, the ND was a guy named Don Shafer. Total pro. No idea what his background was, but about 90 days after I got there, he went to KCBS. Before long, he was Executive Producer at KRON-TV in San Francisco and I think became Assistant ND before going on to be ND at a TV station in a smaller market. Lost track of him, but I know he was ND in Denver in the 80s for a long stretch and San Diego 10 or so years ago.
His #2, a woman he'd hired straight out of Stanford, hired a guy who'd been working for Ron Jacobs at KPOI in Honolulu...so he had his stuff together. A couple of years later, he went to the CBS-TV affiliate in Reno, I got his job in the KOLO newsroom, and eight months later, I followed him over to Channel 2.
At that time, every radio station in Reno (7 AM, 7 FM) had some news commitment that involved one or more people working as reporters and anchors.
Stan Bunger---the guy who replaced Al Hart in mornings at KCBS in 2000---was working at a South Lake Tahoe station when I was at KOLO (we never met then, but I heard him on the air). And he'd worked at stations in King City and Sonora before he got the Tahoe gig. He did Sacramento and San Jose after that. That's 25 years of experience before he started mornings at KCBS---where he reported for 18 years before they chose him to succeed Al.
The ladders that Stan and I climbed (he went considerably higher than I did) aren't there anymore, with the possible exception of the one common entry on both our resumes, KFBK. Though that's not the same gig as it used to be, either.
Today, hundreds of small-to-medium market radio news gigs where you could make your mistakes and polish your craft are gone. The really small places do local news (and it's often the owner or GM doing it), and after that, with very few exceptions, there's public radio and the big stations like KCBS. It's a huge issue and I don't envy Jen Seelig (KCBS' ND) having to navigate it whenever she has an opening.
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The comparison that was being made is KCBS today vs KCBS only ten years ago. Nobody's talking about Cronkite or Murrow.
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It's solid enough to support the transmitter building and the towers. It's adjacent to Gross Field, an airport in Novato. If they ever did take 740 dark, remove the towers and sell the land, perhaps the airport would be interested, either as additional buffer or warehousing.
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I'm sorry that happened. Though I will say that sometimes mentoring involved having the pro yell at you for the rookie mistake you made. I got the foot in the backside about as often as I got the hand on the shoulder. Either way, I learned to do it better next time.
It'll be interesting to see what revisions there will be to floodplain maps after what we went through this winter. While the KCBS site is a few miles from Highway 37, the intervening terrain is flat, and that highway was closed several times this winter. In any event, I doubt that site is going away any time soon, unless Audacy gets extremely desperate.
I won't get into particulars here, since they're mostly boring and I have an introductory post that explains a little of my perspective, but I will say that I had a run of bad luck where station management's response to deficiencies was to fire me without providing much if any feedback or opportunity for improvement. This included one all-news station in a major market. After nine changes of address in two years and a third firing in those years, I reached the conclusion that I had better find some other line of work. Fortunately, a couple of folks reached out and helped and I found an alternative, going on to a 32-year career in IT that was financially rewarding, interesting, and mostly secure. I won't ever know if that next radio job would have been the one where things turned around. I didn't feel I could afford to find out.
For what it's worth, if I had it to do all over again, I would have gone on to become a communications attorney eventually. If I had understood myself better in 1978, I would have figured out that I could have done something useful and profitable with all that time in the University of Missouri Law Library that I spent reading Pike & Fischer and going through the Federal Register.
Ironically back in 2005 the Bay Area had no mainstream Top 40 station. Lol.
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