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Times Guest Columnist -re: Seattle Radio Greed
- Thread starter majoradio
- Start date
majoradio said:
Hard to argue with his point of view...but how do we go "back"? None of today's corporate owners give a rip about community identity. Nor do they want to hire the man power to staff remotes at parades, do play by play of HS Football games or break format to allow the chamber of commerce to take over for a day.
Wippel said it all in his article: Corporate owners don't want to look back. The "good old days" mean nothing to them.
As has been pointed out to me by my GM "It's show business, so what's yer question kid?" (PD goes quietly back to his office with tail tucked between his legs.)
J
JPPatches
Guest
TowerLamp said:
Wouldn't argue with any of it either. But your final paragraph tells all. PD's with stones to stand up for what they believe and a GM with vision (and the stones to back up what they believe) are museum pieces now. As much as I'd love to go back, it's impossible. MBA's replaced trench proven radio vets who slugged their way to the top (after actually WORKING in radio) and knew what it took to be local and win at the same time. Which is why I opted out of participating in the other thread of "What Makes Great Radio". Wishful dreaming on a reality long since past. Show me some PD's/GM's with the experience, balls and financial backing to make it happen and you might have a thread worth talking about.
D
DaveNewton
Guest
I'm a little late to these boards, but it's no good saying it's impossible. And, we're not talking about going "back"...hometown radio never went out of style. Except to radio operators, who thought it was all about music research and other softshoe dances. Yes, greed played its part. Radio always had great margins. Radio owners, then investors, thought, if they're great, they could be awesome. Awesome margins and strangling format discipline took all the spontaniety and local color out of radio. Now, it's all just portfolio management. As you guys say, give us some operators who see the potential in their towns and the talent and energy you find in places like my town, Yakima, and in Seattle, too. It will take courage. What owner's left in Seattle with a Seattle commitment? Fisher? Maybe. Somebody's going to have to look to the audience and the flavor of the city, and turn away from industry norms. Difficult, yes, unlikely, maybe, expensive--yes, compared to enforced awesome profit margins--but, possible? Yes.
This sort of nostalgia fails to recognize one key thing. If Genesee Days OR Chamber Day's were profitable, it would still be done. It isn't that a bunch of idiots suddenly showed up pulling working plugs wherever they went. These programs went away because, for whatever reason, they stopped making money.
Secondly - small markets DO offer all kinds of creative ways to do radio because the community is small enough to have an impact.
Secondly - small markets DO offer all kinds of creative ways to do radio because the community is small enough to have an impact.
D
DaveNewton
Guest
Hey, Jackson. What? Every community event had to make money? Well then, no wonder.
Jackson Dell Weaver said:
Sorry, but this is just wrong, and reflects a poor understanding of economics.
Yeah, some of these small town "homespun" radio stations did go away because they weren't profitable.
But many of these stations were indeed profitable. Unfortunately, the changing regulatory and business environment in radio made it more profitable to do something else with these stations.
Consider the simplest example of a "move in" radio station that can boost coverage area through a power increase or transmitter site move. The station starts out as a 3kw class A FM station earning a moderate profit by serving a town of 25,000 people that is located 30 miles from a town of 250,000 people. Some enterprising engineer notes that this station can upgrade to a 50 kow class C2 facility, and can locate it's tower midway between the two cities. With this upgrade, the station can be sold to the owner of an existing station (or station cluster) and operated as part of a cluster serving the larger city. So the owner ends up with three choices:
1. Continue operating as a station serving the small town, with annual positive cash flow of, perhaps, $100,000
2. Do the upgrade himself, and perhaps increase his annual cash flow, but perhaps sacrificing some of the localness of his station in the process
3. Get the CP to upgrade, and sell the station for perhaps $5 million to the owner of the larger city cluster.
Given the choice of a continuing revenue stream of $100,000 per year or a one-time gain of $5 million, most owners will make the financially logical choice and sell. But note that this option exists entirely because of regulatory changes: the option to boost power as a class C2 came out of Docket 80-90 in the eighties, and the option for the buyer to operate a cluster came out of the Telecomm Act in the nineties. In this instance, the station *was* profitable, but changes in regulation made it more profitable to sell.
And this fictional example does reflect what happened in the real world in many, many instances.
So don't claim that these very local small market stations all failed because they were losing money. It's not true.
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