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TROY PAPER SAYS TALK1300 HOST IS A PHONEY

This confirms my thoughts on who WROW needs to be. REAL NEWS! I'll say it again for those of you who failed to hear me. REAL NEWS!
Get out there and report. The Capital Region is hungry for a real News Talk station. Let the listeners who want phoney stay there. Bring back those listeners who want the real thing.
 
WROW am drive is ok but the pm drive stinks for two reasons:
A) because since Mike and the Mad Dog you never know when you'll get hit between the ears with a newscast.
and
B) the afternoon news can be heard in its entirety simply by tuning into 590am the night before! Sounds like somebody isn't doing his job!
 
youthinkyouknowradio said:
This confirms my thoughts on who WROW needs to be. REAL NEWS! I'll say it again for those of you who failed to hear me. REAL NEWS!
Get out there and report. The Capital Region is hungry for a real News Talk station. Let the listeners who want phoney stay there. Bring back those listeners who want the real thing.
Click to expand...

Years ago, Albany Broadcasting did a good job with News station WPTR-1540, during the early 90s. Unfortunately they sold it off to the god squad. What a waste of 50,000 watts!!!! Perhaps they should revive that format on 590.
 
Speaking of gods...The big boss man of ABC should be listening to what the people are saying on this board. The listener wants a real local news station back in the Capital Region. Stop being lazy and give em what they want. It's ok... that school yard bully WGY will leave you alone. Clear Channel has become set in their ways. Now is the time for a sneak attack. Oh and by the way big boss man you hired Vandenburg and now it's time to FIRE at him with a great radio station.
 
WROW was better when Vandenburgh was busy keeping the so-called Big Man away from it. (By the way, the BIG MAN is pretty busy losing his shirt in the car business.) FYI: Big Man thinks the swap shop host is "afternoon drive" material !?$#$%!!
 
The paper didn't actually say this but a caller on the sound off line did. You can do the same and maybe they'll print it. After all if it's in the paper it must be true!

If the bossman is loosing his shirt in the car business then how is the radio business doing?
 
Just look at the ratings. WROW at its lowest since pre-Vandenburgh days.
 
The Record did NOT call PV a Phoney, one of the cranks who calls the "Sound Off" telephone number did.

There is also a great deal of misunderstanding and bizarre discussion in this room over exactly what ratings are and what they mean, I thought the people on these boards were broadcasters.

For those who are not, here is PD 101 on ARB:

1. They are currency for national buys, national buys are usually top 25 markets and syndicated shows (based on their aggregate rating). Arbitron numbers are worth about as much as a share of Citadel stock today as far as the remaining markets are concerned. Their only value in a market like Albany is internal, they allow a PD to track his station's hot zip codes, performance in key demos, etc... and allow sales to design packages to better target flights and enhance response (thus value) to the sponsor.

2. The published 12+, M-Su, 6A - 12mid share is meaningless, that is why Arbitron gives it away. You cannot learn much about a station's performance from the 12+. What is the station's targeted demographics (age, gender, zip code, household income) and what do those numbers show? A quarterly trip to ARB to eyeball diaries provides even more detailed and useful information... like PV's small 12+ number is garbage because that number is high quality in that it is disproportionately business and political decision makers. On the downside, take those listeners away and what's left is nearly all 65+ (very low quality).

3. The only numbers that matter are M-F, 6A - 6P, even within desired demographics.

4. PV or WROW are winning / losing or whatever; wrong. PV has a head start in that he ran the old WQBK in exile on 590 until he could buy 1300 and bring it back, so all he really did was take the format back to its home. WROW on the otherhand is building (poorly) a whole new radio station from the remains, that is a 2 - 5 year project before the first reliable audience measurements jell. Then they are useful only in terms of measuring the station's performance in its targeted demographics. Additionally, since clusters usually sell as clusters WROW has to fit a specific niche, as much its sister stations in the cluster. No individual station has to be a stunning performer so long as it does well in its niche.

4. The monthly ratings report is raw (unweighted) and is a rolling average that is subject to wild swings from month to month. Those swings can be anything from diary placement to external events that alter listening habits for their duration (listeners flocking to WGY for school closings for example).

Now WROW has blown itself up again, only 9 months into it and has to start all over again from where they were last October. ABC flushed a lot of money down the drain on their experiement, do they have the money to make this new format fly? If the stories about an internal tug of war among management are true then the effort is doomed.
 
Enough with this i'm not a PD but I play one in my spare time. Anyone can pick up a Arbitron book and read, read, read. I bet you can find one in many places around a radio station. I understand how the numbers work. Here is the point i'm trying to make. Remeber in the day...when WGNA was just a little tiny radio station. They would make it a full time job to shake the hands of the listeners that they knew one day would make them who they are today. When they had a little Saturday remote this it what it included. Pony rides, a popcorn machine, a building size blow up of the mascot, an intern who would dress up as the mascot at every event, and clowns to paint the faces of those little ones who are their core demo today. Someone very, very, very, smart knew what they wanted to build and for who. That dear person can't be found in a Arbitron book. It goes all the way way back to the early days of WTRY. A top 40's rock and roll station that took a rediculous amount of acne meds and filled in a huge pot hole on one of the bridges going into Troy.The City refused to listen and fill it in. A WTRY jock took that call from an angry listener and made WTRY stand out that day. A little heart and dedication is a huge part of what it takes to be on top. You can't keep doing the same things every day and expect to get different results. The Albany radio market as a whole has become LAZY. Put the Arbitron book down and go out and get those listeners. Until we do this... WGNA will continue to sit around and collect the number one spot for an empire that was built on hard work and follow through a long time ago. The numbers will already be there if you have done the work to earn the listeners. That is what I think radio is built on...not a Arbitron book.
 
Which brings us right back to this::::

I know EXACTLY how to build a station that would kick butt left and right. But there isn't a station owner or manager who would ever let me. I don't the money to go out and buy 92.3 or 95.5, but if I did I assure you I'd have a station up within a year that would beat WGNA by a mile. I'd have double digit numbers, and I assure you I am DEAD SERIOUS.

Just a few times, Pamal almost knew what they were doing. But then egos collide. FLY, JAMZ and B are just "too close" - when Sugar Bear left FLY to build JAMZ he accomplished the remarkable, but JAMZ hurt FLY's ratings, (becoming a REAL THREAT: Hip Hop was already #1 in Nyw York City and the industry was abuzz that Albany was next in line - within 6 months JAMZ would displace WGNA) so Pamal kicked Bear out and set up a big photo of their "new target:" A White late 20s single mom with a small child or two, a young professional who likes to part and will date across racial lines. I have a picture of that photo.

When Vandenburgh left WROW, management created another "target" - a mythical beamer-driving young man in his early 30s, another young professional living in Clifton Park. We all how far south that went with Scotto and Marko.

Pamal struck gold with MAGIC, which shot up in ratings while the Sales Department struggled to get anyone to sponsor - that's why network news was tossed on - not to inform the public but to give the station spots besides ABC gym and Kookie Suzuki et al.

Pamal's targets fail because they are not based on REAL people in the market. That's WGNA's secret. Heck, that's Vandenburgh's secret, although he goes the informercial route. As you pointed out, they cast the mold early on and REAL ALBANY-TROY-SCHENECTADY people IDENTIFY with them (of course, the POP-ularization of Country music solidifies that rather nicely!)
 
Which brings us right back to a subject that caught my attention in this room in the first place - you can build such a station but your huge market share will be of a rapidly shrinking whole and drastically reduced in quality. This market has dropped 20 positions in size (from the mid-40s to the mid-60s) in less than 15 years. The market population has shrunk in all the worst possible demos from radio's point of view leaving older people with lower household incomes behind.

It is not just population outflow indigenous to this market either. The market is deserting old broadcast media in a growing torrent without packing a single box, or better put - radio has been wildly successful in making itself irrelevant to the listener just as new media has worked even harder to capture that market.

To compare; you could build the world's greatest steam engine too, given enough money and effort, but your return on investment would make that a clear loser (which is why nobody is investing in steam engines today). Same thing is happening with radio. Just like the airlines supplanted rail as a means of transporting people newer and more effective (and cheaper per person) ways of delivering content have replaced old fashioned over the air radio and television as primary news, information and entertainment resources for a critical mass of the marketplace.

Rail travel survives only with enormous amounts of public dollars thrown at them to keep it clinging to life. Radio will only survive if it reinvents itself again (as it has several times in its history when faced with new technology that better filled the market role played by radio.) The market for over the air, one-size fits all content has dried up. Today's market wants their content on demand, to be cutting edge and tailored to individual needs and wants. Today's listener DOES build their own dream station, and they do it by the growing millions! You have the ability to do it right now in fact, and the one thing that you do NOT need to build your dream radio station is a radio station! That is why there are a growing number of major and large market "radio" shows that perform horribly in the ratings but stay on the air because they have such a huge iPod download ranking - their radio incarnation is only a small piece of their distribution system. That is also why radio stations allocate more and more of their spot inventory to driving listeners FROM the signal to the Web, and use both to drive bodies into sponsor events where the radio station profit comes from selling the booths and click through Web ads to participating sponsors and not from the cheap to free promotional spots on the air. In short, the radio station is no longer the destination, it is the barker trying to direct customers to the actual proftit center for the "broadcaster."

As for your 20th Century dream station, anybody with the money to do it will not do it in the 21st. That is why they have money, because if they do invest in radio they will not invest in the old way, they will find new uses for the properties and the signals the same way that investors took an old Ohio buggy maker named "Fischer" in 1908 and gave it a new lease on life as the maker of automobile bodies for General Motors until 1984. Would you have insisted that they simply design the greatest buggy ever, and then put your money behind it? I doubt it, an act that foolish would be an indication of somebody without the market awareness to have earned that amount of money or credit in the first place.
 
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