The AM's Aren't Dead Yet......

[BaltimoreJack]

This morning's edition of Inside Radio is reporting that WBZ was Boston's top radio biller for 2008. When you work out the numbers you'll find that WBZ has an average monthly billing of over 2.6 million. So while it's not always the case...at least in Boston..AM's not dead yet!

 

[warmland]

This morning's edition of Inside Radio is reporting that WBZ was Boston's top radio biller for 2008. When you work out the numbers you'll find that WBZ has an average monthly billing of over 2.6 million. So while it's not always the case...at least in Boston..AM's not dead yet!

Yes "some" AM stations in "some" major markets do well, but the vast majority of AM has been dying for years. WBZ is a news operation for the most part and has a very powerful signal. Some of the biggest AM stations like WABC and WLS stopped playing music many years ago and AM talk took over.

 

[BaltimoreJack]

I didn't say everyone..I didn't make a blanket statement. I wanted to offer a little good news..a little sunshine about AM radio. If you want to rain on it..then if that's you're thing go ahead.

 

[warmland]

I didn't say everyone..I didn't make a blanket statement. I wanted to offer a little good news..a little sunshine about AM radio. If you want to rain on it..then if that's you're thing go ahead.

Wow!!! hold on, no need to get upset. There are less than a handful of AM stations doing well. Facts are facts. Yes, a little good news is nice to hear for once.

 

[ThomasCarten]

I often wonder what happened here, with Routh 81's purchase of WNAK. I do not know any of the details at all and will not speculate beyond this ... but:

WNAK was in 17th place when Margie McQuillan showed up. She took it to 5th. It was a locally-focused station with all sorts of community involvement. Then something happened and I don't know what, but Margie was pushed, jumped or fell; whatever, she suddenly was no longer at WNAK and the station's focus changed away from local to who-cares.

It dropped from 5th to the bottom of a mine shaft.

I've heard a jock on in afternoons and maybe Paula doing another shift. Maybe things will get better ... maybe. We need a good hayna station that speaks to the dominant crowd in the Valley and can sell that fact to potential advertisers.

IMO.

 

[pell guy]

AM Radio can still make a come back,you just need the right sales and programming team.
WNAK was on the right track when they started,hopefully they can get things going again,as for WARM,its too bad CITADEL doesn't
seem to care , It would be a tragedy if they ever ''pulled the plug' on the station.
I was visiting a radio buddy of mine in Philadelphia a few weeks ago,he works part time for WBCB-AM in Bucks County,
this station is proof that AM can still make it,they have a rather eclectic music format,along with alot of paid programming,
tons of local sports,and they are LIVE 24/7!

,

 

[NHRadio]

Since when does paid programming=live 24/7?
Is it the paid local interview type of program or the typical religion/colon blow pill/weight loss dreck?

along with alot of paid programming,
tons of local sports,and they are LIVE 24/7!

 

[BaltimoreJack]

I often wonder what happened here, with Routh 81's purchase of WNAK. I do not know any of the details at all and will not speculate beyond this ... but:

WNAK was in 17th place when Margie McQuillan showed up. She took it to 5th. It was a locally-focused station with all sorts of community involvement. Then something happened and I don't know what, but Margie was pushed, jumped or fell; whatever, she suddenly was no longer at WNAK and the station's focus changed away from local to who-cares.

It dropped from 5th to the bottom of a mine shaft.

I've heard a jock on in afternoons and maybe Paula doing another shift. Maybe things will get better ... maybe. We need a good hayna station that speaks to the dominant crowd in the Valley and can sell that fact to potential advertisers.

IMO.

For whatever reason you are very connected to WNAK, and feel that Margie McQ was some sort of radio savior. She wasn't. You also feel that WNAK would be just what the area needs, never mind that AMs in general are struggling, and traditional radio is more and more being considered an antiquated media by young people on the way up. Yes, I think it's great that stations like WBZ, WCCO, WLS, WABC and a few others still shine brightly. I still wish WABC was playing music but I have had to accept the reality that those days are gone. WNAK has a huge day signal, and can't be heard around the corner from it's tower at night. Yes, it had HUGE numbers. But those numbers were so solidly 70+ no major advertiser or agency would touch them. They had great numbers before Route 81 came along, and nobody wanted to buy it then, so it's hardly Route 81's fault. Have you taken a drive by their tower site in recent months? The grounds are an overgrown mess which would require tens of thousands of dollars to bring just the grounds into compliance let alone make any sort of decent upgrade. Those grounds were over grown long before Route 81 came along. The sainted Bob N. didn't take care of anything either..so poor care begets more poor care until everything of value just falls apart. WNAK should either be donated to the communications school at LCCC and let them fix it up and use it for their students, or shut down and it's license returned to the FCC. Otherwise you can only expect more of the same from it's current or a new owner, since it is unlikely anyone short of a wealthy hobbyist or college will have the money to properly take care of the physical plant.

 

[ThomasCarten]

Jack...

Since I don't know who you are, or if you are connected with WNAK, I can't vouch for your accuracy.

>>>and feel that Margie McQ was some sort of radio savior. She wasn't.<<<

If you know her well, maybe she wasn't. But the station hopped with local involvement whenever I dropped in or listened. And going from 17th to 5th sure means something in my book.

>>>You also feel that WNAK would be just what the area needs, never mind that AMs in general are struggling<<<

Let them struggle; I think old folks still buy products, just different ones. Savvy advertisers know this and that's how Lawrence Welk made his money.

>>>WNAK has a huge day signal, and can't be heard around the corner from it's tower at night.<<<

I listen to it in Exeter on its night power. A bit weak, yes, but things get better after I get to the FF Airport.

>>>Have you taken a drive by their tower site in recent months? The grounds are an overgrown mess which would require tens of thousands of dollars to bring just the grounds into compliance let alone make any sort of decent upgrade.<<<

Have you seen the antenna farm going into NYC? Talk about overgrown. Grass and weeds make no difference to radio signals. Even so, you can get some kid with a riding mower for a song -- far less than tens of thousands of dollars. Unless you mean the ground radials, which makes the sentence mixed up.

>>>It is unlikely anyone short of a wealthy hobbyist or college will have the money to properly take care of the physical plant.<<<

Sounds good over the air. If xmtr work needs to be done, then do it. If, in the quote above, you are talking about cutting grass, no problem; if you are talking about ground radials, how do you know this?

 

[masterg]

I just gotta ask. See, I don't come here that much these days, mostly because it's not a very active board. I can skip it for weeks on end and likely miss nothing, which is too bad.

But back to what I gotta ask - what in hell is the strange fascination with WNAK? Forgive me, we all have our quirks, our idiosyncrasies, but this obsession with WNAK really puzzles me.

I did radio long enough in this market to know that whatever numbers WNAK once had were due to some inexplicable fluke of diary placement. To quote the late Ron Allen on WNAK's "big" numbers, "I've been in radio my entire adult life here and I'm still waiting to meet my first WNAK listener."

Just so you'll know, I never worked at WNAK and never wanted to. Even 30 years ago WNAK was considered one of the "market dogs" by most, and it certainly didn't get any better over time. That's no reflection on those who worked there, but rather a sad commentary on those who owned the place and never paid anyone a living wage, nor much cared about the sound of the station.

One final note; AM is dead. And FM ain't all that far behind it. The world, as we know it, is changing right before our eyes. Newspapers are in deep dirt across the country. Major market television news departments are folding weekly. And radio is neither immune nor protected from this sea change that we are experiencing at this very second.

OK, one really final note; it would be a small act of mercy to take WARM off the air.

 

[ThomasCarten]

>>>Forgive me, we all have our quirks, our idiosyncrasies, but this obsession with WNAK really puzzles me.<<<

I think it may be a matter of:

a) It should have died ages ago, but keeps going on and we wonder how and why.
b) its continuing existence defies all commonly-held rules of radio.
c) It's the little engine that couldn't, but does.
d) Ever watch a silent film where the two trains are heading toward each other, then one switches tracks? You keep waiting for the train wreck, over and over, but it never happens.

Ron Allen was flat-out wrong. Sorry, Ron in heaven, but you must not have heard of the 730 Club and its file cards of listeners -- a percentage of whom were called on the phone every day to see how they were doing, what they thought of the music, etc. It built amazing station loyalty.

 

[BaltimoreJack]

Excuse me your Fathership..but if you think a kid on a ZTR machine can take care of WNAK's grounds you know NOTHING about what you speak. The entire area that the tower is on is a FOREST! Not an overgrown-weedy lot, but a fully forested piece of ground. There can't be a single ground radial left because the ground is a forest and the the tree growth would have ripped the radials out of the ground. The only thing that helps WNAK's signal is that the whole thing is a spongy swamp which helps conductivity. The trees on that property are somewhere between 10 & 20+ feet tall. You would need someone like Asplundh to come in and LOG off all those trees, then re-work the ground and plant brand new radials. The kid running your ZTR machine would barely have room to mow between the trees. He'd need a Cat D-9. In fact, Route 81's engineer had an estimate done for land clearing when they bought WNAK in 2004 and the estimate then was $43,000 to get the trees out of WNAK's grounds. That was JUST for land clearing. It didn't even begin to cover new radials and transmission lines. Drive by the place on Route 11 and look. Really..really look. It's done..stick a fork in it all. The truth is with all the signals in the general NEPA area, every single AM from Hazleton to Forest City could be shut down, and there would still be enough FMs to supply all the formats that anyone would want to listen to.

 

[ThomasCarten]

I go by there occasionally, but the way I travel, it's hard to get a good look without becoming a statistic. Next time I'm there, I'll find a place to (a) slow down or (b) park. Is there an entrance road to the site?

btw: I'm glad I'm not a nun, or you'd be calling me a Mothership. That's too UFO for me.

 

[ognir rrats]

As Father Tom said, WNAK should have died ages ago, but it didn't...and I would agree that is part of the fascination. I think another part is the fact that it remained a mom-and-pop for so long when pretty much nothing else did, and remained successful to a degree. It did have a very loyal audience that stayed with them through thick and thin for years and years, but it never found a way to replace them as they slowly dropped off one by one.

I cannot buy the "diary-placement fluke" story as it was not just highly rated for a book or two, it was in the Top 5 or Top 10 for years. It may not have been glamorous, but it was definitely not a fluke.

One aspect of the resurgence, if you will, when Route 81 first took over was the simulcast on 94.3 FM as WNAK-FM. That opened up an audience in and around Carbondale that had never heard of WNAK before as the AM signal did not reach up there. Plus, they were live and local in the morning with Terry McNulty, J. Kristopher and Paula Deignan -- a perfect combination to attract and maintain an audience heavy into nostalgia. Around that time period, the station was nominated nationally for Adult Standard Station of the Year -- that cannot be attributed to "diary-placement fluke" -- how many other local stations were nominated in their respective formats?

The old "the audience is all retirees and shut-ins" line is more relevant than the "diary-placement fluke" argument. Under the Neilson regime they basically stopped trying to sell the station, and Route 81 was never able to find anyone who could do it as they went through sales staffs every few months. The switch of WNAK-FM to Lite 94.3 was the clear signal that they had given up trying. I still think it would be easier to sell the top-rated standards station (really the only one in the market) than the 7th-best adult contemporary station, but I'm no sales professional, so what do I know?

I don't really get why you all are so quick to want to turn off the lights at all of these stations and leave the market to only KRZ, Magic, Froggy and Rock 107. We need variety, even if it is not glamorous.

 

[BaltimoreJack]

I wouldn't argue with variety, and I wouldn't think that leaving the market to KRudZ, Toady & Tragic-93 is a good move either. The growing cost of keeping & maintaining AM stations is part of the trouble with why they are failing. When you have to keep ground systems and other AM-specific needs, companies who are ruled by the motto "greed is good & cheap is better" the AMs are going to fall father & farther behind. Even if a good, local operator came along and perhaps purchased WARM or WNAK, they would have to spend so much to repair the technical end of the operation before they could really expect to compete, they are already on a downward spiral. In NEPA there are so many Class-A FMs which don't do anything other than be companion frequencies to larger FMs, it would be wiser to make better use of these facilities by actually programming them indivudually. You could easily have a standards station, as the Father put it..a Heyna" station, hell, you could have a Bulgarian station. But the cost of operation of the FM frequency as opposed to the costs of keeping an AM going would be better. Not to think of the up-front costs in fixing up WARM or WNAK to make them technically able to compete. Plus, if you are going to hope to have a station like WNAK make money, attitudes in the advertsiting world have to change. You will never get someone at MotorWorld for example or one of the agencies to consider an "older" audience. So while an owner could put forth a stellar programming operation, unless they are successful in making major changes to how advertisers perceive a 50+ audience, they will always be on the verge of bankruptcy, which is a lousy way to live.

 

[NigelWick]

In other words, AM radio is dead.

 

[BaltimoreJack]

In general it's dead..in other places it's on life-support and in a few places it's still very strong. It's like any other thing. We make a big deal about radio being live..or alive. Well if that's the analogy that people want to use, then let's look at it this way..If something is alive and you neglect it, don't care for it, and don't feed it..it's going to die. For the most part, that's what this business has done to AM radio. Refusal to invest in even the smallest amount in required service has been the hallmark of today's radio companies. They just work it to death, and when it's dead, it's kicked to the curb. If you bought a car and didn't change the oil, air filter and plugs every so often it wouldn't run. None of the vaunted radio CEOs would do that to their shiny over-priced Lexus, But they will do that with an AM radio station that they own. AM radio is mostly dead or dieing because (the business) has killed it. I worked in a cluster awhile ago that was made up of a mix of AM & FM stations. The Ops Manager told me once.."God I wish those GD AMs would just die or catch fire or something..I hate them!"
Beautiful. So yep..for the most part the AMs are dieing. Sure there are those that do pretty well. WBZ, WGN, WCCO, WJR, KDKA & KYW come to mind. Now granted they are 50Kw stations with a lot of hertitage, but even WNBF up in Binghamton still comes in #1 every now and then. There are still plenty of people who still listen to little WAZL over in Hazleton, WHLM in Bloom or WDOS in Oneonta, NY. So there still are individual success stories. When I started this thread, it was my point to show that despite all the problems that AM has, the #1 radio biller for the big Boston market, was an AM station. Not bad. But you can't expect an AM to thrive or even survive if you starve it, choke it and kick it. It needs some TLC once in awhile.

 

[kfitz]

Regarding WNAK, I've listened and I don't think the signal is all that bad. The ground system may not be great but the oversize tower and swampy conditions make up for much of that. Because of the oversize tower an "above ground" ground system with six ground wires could be installed and the insulator moved up 20 feet. I'd guesstimate tree cutting that to be 10 or 15 grand....certainly do-able.

When this thread got started it was noted that many big city AM's (Boston, NY, Philly SF) do very well, especially financially. There are a lot of smaller financially successful AM's out there. Look south to the Lehigh valley. WHOL and WGPA both do very well, not because of ratings but because of there approach to broadcasting on AM. In NEPA, look at WEJL-WBAX, they're doing well. It's possible to be successful on AM, just not as easy as FM. We need some create people to take over some of these AM's and make them work. Admittedly, it would be good for some of the bad AM's to go away and clear the band for the ones that really work. Much of the signal trouble on AM is caused by the overcrowding on the band.

 

[ThomasCarten]

>>>Much of the signal trouble on AM is caused by the overcrowding on the band.<<<

If the failed AM's were on the Graveyard Freqs and could be cleared out, that would be a start. I was the chief at a station in MA which I could barely hear from home because of all the garbage on 1400. Never could understand how Vir James, down in Virginia, could hear our 1kc test tone for freq measuring.

 

[crmc]

Before we close the casket on AM, a fact that may surprise you: just two hours down the PA Turnpike in Philadelphia, three of the 6 top billing stations in the market are AMs.
Now the IMHO part: I believe that the reason the AMs have suffered in NEPA is threefold- the market is over-radioed with Class A FMs which have filled the void of the 1000 watt AM community stations we all knew,loved, and worked at, the technical plants of these AMs have been ignored for over 30 years, and most compelling content has moved off the band.

In Philly, 610 WIP doesn't really have a great signal ( despite it's dial position) but it's content is terrific, origional, and local. It's annual Wingbowl draws 17,000 men on the Friday morning before the Superbowl every year for what is believed to be the number 1 non-concert radio event in America. Sports figures, celebrities, politicians, and even the President of the United States( he called three times during his successful quest for office) are or have been callers into the station.

I think our metro covers such a wide area and has so much media fighting for such few dollars that AMs viability is in it's ability to be a part of a network like ESPN on WEJL/WBAX and it's FM translators or the WILK network.