Exactly. They moved on to new and better mediums than AM radio.
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Ways to revive talk radio in LA market
- Thread starter xkxrx
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Exactly. They moved on to new and better mediums than AM radio.
Back in the 70s, my family would have KABC on all day in the house, and in the car. We lived in Southwestern Los Angeles (Florence/Western area).
In the 80s, we moved to the extreme eastern portion of LA County (Pomona/Claremont area). KABC didn't come in nearly as well there, and we didn't listen to it as often. (Mostly KNX., and at night, KGO from San Francisco were favorite stations at that point)
"Old" Millennial here (about 40).
It was less about the medium and more to do with the fact that AM radio was toxic to audiences of my generation for decades. From Rush Limbaugh making fun of us (citing the film "Failure to Launch"). To Rush Limbaugh calling us "sluts" for our believing health insurance companies should cover birth control. To basically every other show copying Rush Limbaugh and indulging the Boomer audience while always making my generation the butt of every joke, cause of every problem, and treating us as childish punching bag looooong after we into our careers.
Image if the Greatest and Silent Generations had created content like that, that vilified the young constantly? Would it be any shock when Boomers didn't turn up? (Perhaps they did, and I'm certain that media is DEAD).
(Side note: KFI bought themselves time by dumping Limbaugh while he was still hot and... alive. It lent credibility to a then-30-year-old listener that KFI was not interested in using my generation as a scapegoat. Their general talk was appealing to me. And even now, they are pushing the crap out of the podcasts and the iHeartRadio app, feverishly figuring out how to monetize the new methods in anticipation of a steep drop-off of AM listeners in some future year). I listen 90% of the time via podcast.
AM talk is DEAD. There's no saving it. There's no saving AM because it's the least efficient way to deliver talk. Crackling. Low fidelity. And worse of tall, stigmatized (and a well-earned toxic stigma!)
Where did my peers go?
- Public radio programs (that were more even-handed, rather than rallying for one side versus another)
- General talk via RSS or YouTube (it turns out people care about FAR MORE than left-vs-right politics)
- Political podcasts (both left and right, who do a better addressing issues relevant to our group than Hannity, Rush, etc. ever could have)
- Reddit. Facebook. Twitter. Who needs AM radio to see people duke it out over partisan politics?
If history is any indication, they won't. (But they could.)
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You're complaints about Rush prove his points.
As I often say: ''The industry" isn't one thing. It's not unified, and it doesn't act in unified ways. KABC is doing what you suggest. For them, the signal is just an extension of the Cumulus national talk and podcast business. They left LA local radio when they sold KLOS and the ABC radio building on La Cienega. On the other hand, Tavis Smiley sees things differently, and has built a community agency around KBLA. He doesn't seem to care about demographics or young audiences. He seems to be running his operation as a non-commercial station. I don't expect to see major radio companies investing in AM stations. I'm not sure we'll see them buying FM stations either. They're overpriced and just lead previously successful companies into bankruptcy.
The few attempts to do young or "hot talk" didn't last. The Hot Talk stations built around Howard Stern died as soon as Howard went satellite.
Sir, your post is refreshing and appreciated! (Me mid-boomer.)
Sacramento County, California - Wikipedia
Where Rush Limbaughs political talk show originated. Back in the 1980's when Rush replaced Morton Downey on KFBK. The demographics for Sacramento County in the 1980's was more Republican leaning then. His setup was based on the demos of 1980. Today the demographics changed and how that happens in practice on the national level. It's the PD's and GM's that gave birth to replicating rush in the rest of the country without giving a second thought over how that plays out over decades like change in median demos.
Does the bravest man in America still have a show on kabc?Some interesting ideas, but the author doesn't take into account that the KABC signal no longer has the coverage it did during its heyday.
Talk radio isn’t dead. But there are ways to revive it in Southern California
How should a station improve its chances, asks radio columnist Richard Wagoner.www.dailynews.com
I personally don't enjoy talk radio but he would be an obvious exception as he is an important person to check in with especially post 2k2.0.
Ah, good to know. Never really followed her music much.
It's not just AM radio that is dead. Talk radio, for exactly the same reasons you just laid out, is less viable that adult standards but at least has no music royalties. Talk radio failed to evolve for a life without Rush and they are less relevant than ever.
Rush did not save AM radio. He gave it time for the embalming fluid to set in.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
But Mr. Wagoner's employment precedes that hedge fund's ownership ...
I was talking with a friend whose plugged into the finance side the other day and asked whether she knew of any hedge funds still in radio or traditional media in general. Her answer was essentially; not many, if any. Which may also account for why the share price of companies with radio or TV portfolios have been sliding since 2008.
True too! We seen similar stories on how Newsmax and OAN on the TV side are too dependent on pundits that play the same playbook as Rush.
Possible unpopular opinion: Had consolodation not occurred, AM radio (with a few exceptions) would have died by 2005.
I think so. The way consolidation happened, they bought entire groups of stations that included boat anchors along with some profitable FMs. They didn't just cherry pick the good FMs. For a while, the money from the FMs was enough to cover the losses from the boat anchors. But now, 20 years later, it's not enough.
Specifically in LA, the money from KLOS wasn't enough to cover for KABC. Especially when they were competing against iHeart that had three stations in the Top 5.
Plenty of AMs were making money for the big groups. A few, like KGO, WLS, WABC and KABC (see a corporate commonality there?) were badly programmed and had been on decline since around 2000-2005. But if you looked at ones like WSB, KMOX, WBBM, WCBS, WINS, WBZ, WBAP, KRTH, KOGO, WFAN, KOA, KSL and loads of others, going down to relatively small markets, there were many profitable AMs.
The commonality is that they all have good signals that cover their market. Of all the AMs in the Top 100 markets, around 1600, fewer than 180 have a listenable signal that covers at least 80% of the geographical area of the market day and night.
There are markets like Phoenix with none. Or ones like Cleveland with just one. A few, like NYC, have four or five, but the average is less than two full market AM signals per Top 100 market.
This has everything to do with signal and very little to do with consolidation. In a few cases, such as the one I cited, it's mostly good signals but bad management decisions.
But KABC was a dead station 30 years ago. When I did news/talk from 1995 to 2000 in LA, we always saw KFI as the gold standard and got very thrilled to beat them in 18-49 and 25-54, our core demos. Our overnight audience beat KABC's daytime dayparts and we ignored it. And KABC's signal by the 80's was inadequate to cover the "white flight" to the outer parts of the market.
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