Well said, barman. You put today's talk radio picture in clear focus. The radio-TV-media-technology landscape is far different than it was ten years ago when there was no YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, etc. and for that matter, Radio-Info.com.
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WHAM rumblings
- Thread starter dustintv
- Start date
barman said:
barman, you make an excellent point. Mike Malloy is hard even for a liberal like me to stomach.
However, there are plenty of talkers on both sides who can make a passionate case for their point of view without being abusive to the point of driving away listeners. Thom Hartmann is no Mike Malloy.
Just because things appear rotten right now is no reason to accept that they should stay that way.
B
Bob1370
Guest
Barman commented, "I think that what's different between then and now is back then KABC was marketed as "intelligent talk" and they delivered, in that there was no name-calling or diatribe between hosts of differing viewpoints. MSNBC and Fox had not been invented yet, so there wasn't much screaming. People of differing viewpoints could listen to the other side's thoughtful presentation, boring as that might be compared to now. Today we don't care as much about thinking as we do validation of our personal viewpoint, and perhaps not minding if personal name-calling occurs. It's about emotion now."
It's important to remember that since KABC went away from what made it successful back in 1996, no commercial talk station has come close to the revenue and profitability it enjoyed. Meanwhile the noncomms have vastly increased their audience in the same time frame.
There's all sorts of ad money in smart talk delivered with wit and entertainment value, and it mystifies me that no one wants to collect any of it. Guys like Beck and Savage are tough sells (we all know how many accounts are instructing their agencies not to buy those shows), Limbaugh's not all that much easier, and a lot of money (and a lot of 25-49 listeners) will continue to be left on the table as a result. Bad business plan, but stations can't break their bad programming habits ibecause the suits won't admit they misread Limbaugh's appeal 20 years ago and none of his clones can come close even to matching his slowly fading appeal.
It's important to remember that since KABC went away from what made it successful back in 1996, no commercial talk station has come close to the revenue and profitability it enjoyed. Meanwhile the noncomms have vastly increased their audience in the same time frame.
There's all sorts of ad money in smart talk delivered with wit and entertainment value, and it mystifies me that no one wants to collect any of it. Guys like Beck and Savage are tough sells (we all know how many accounts are instructing their agencies not to buy those shows), Limbaugh's not all that much easier, and a lot of money (and a lot of 25-49 listeners) will continue to be left on the table as a result. Bad business plan, but stations can't break their bad programming habits ibecause the suits won't admit they misread Limbaugh's appeal 20 years ago and none of his clones can come close even to matching his slowly fading appeal.
It's important to remember that since KABC went away from what made it successful back in 1996, no commercial talk station has come close to the revenue and profitability it enjoyed.
According to industry reports, KFI over the years has contributed a considerable amount of revenue to Clear Channel, quite possibly more than KABC ever generated.
There's all sorts of ad money in smart talk delivered with wit and entertainment value, and it mystifies me that no one wants to collect any of it. Guys like Beck and Savage are tough sells (we all know how many accounts are instructing their agencies not to buy those shows), Limbaugh's not all that much easier, and a lot of money (and a lot of 25-49 listeners) will continue to be left on the table as a result. Bad business plan, but stations can't break their bad programming habits because the suits won't admit they misread Limbaugh's appeal 20 years ago and none of his clones can come close even to matching his slowly fading appeal.
News talk radio demographics skew 50+. Right or wrong, agencies aren't interested in the 50-64 or 55+ demos. The mention of WBEN and aging demographics irks some readers, but the fact is Buffalo's only commercial news-talk station tops the 12+ ratings largely due to a strong performance 65+ where it garners more than a 22 share for Men 65+ and more than a 26 share for Women 65+ according to the limited ratings I've seen from the Fall '09 Arbitron.
To be fair, WBEN has respectable shares 45-54 and the station gets results for a number of advertisers that target "older white folks that live in the suburbs and continue to listen to AM." Targeting your base is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it's smart programming and marketing.
Sports talk appears to have the greatest success in reaching Men 25-44, especially when the format is on FM as CBS has done in Detroit and Philadelphia. I do not know if Entercom sells WGR and WBEN in combo, but the two stations deliver a particularly strong combo for buyers who seek Men 25+. It's difficult to imagine how WECK competes on the street against WBEN. Would it be a surprise to find that Entercom packages WGR's strong 25-44 with WBEN's strong 45+ and adds the anemic ratings of The Lake (which had an embarrassing Fall book) against Citadel's 97 Rock and The Edge? The cost per thousand and cost per point battles must make for interesting sales presentations, both direct and agency.
NPR and public radio stations have similar older demographic appeal and the national and local honchos are trying to figure out how to survive over the next five to ten years. In Buffalo, it seems WBFO's braintrust has looked at the ratings and trends and decided the best way to survive is to scuttle jazz during the day and canabalize or borrow syndicated programs from its AM competitor, WNED. In this regard, Public Radio seems to be taking its cue from commercial radio.
According to industry reports, KFI over the years has contributed a considerable amount of revenue to Clear Channel, quite possibly more than KABC ever generated.
There's all sorts of ad money in smart talk delivered with wit and entertainment value, and it mystifies me that no one wants to collect any of it. Guys like Beck and Savage are tough sells (we all know how many accounts are instructing their agencies not to buy those shows), Limbaugh's not all that much easier, and a lot of money (and a lot of 25-49 listeners) will continue to be left on the table as a result. Bad business plan, but stations can't break their bad programming habits because the suits won't admit they misread Limbaugh's appeal 20 years ago and none of his clones can come close even to matching his slowly fading appeal.
News talk radio demographics skew 50+. Right or wrong, agencies aren't interested in the 50-64 or 55+ demos. The mention of WBEN and aging demographics irks some readers, but the fact is Buffalo's only commercial news-talk station tops the 12+ ratings largely due to a strong performance 65+ where it garners more than a 22 share for Men 65+ and more than a 26 share for Women 65+ according to the limited ratings I've seen from the Fall '09 Arbitron.
To be fair, WBEN has respectable shares 45-54 and the station gets results for a number of advertisers that target "older white folks that live in the suburbs and continue to listen to AM." Targeting your base is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it's smart programming and marketing.
Sports talk appears to have the greatest success in reaching Men 25-44, especially when the format is on FM as CBS has done in Detroit and Philadelphia. I do not know if Entercom sells WGR and WBEN in combo, but the two stations deliver a particularly strong combo for buyers who seek Men 25+. It's difficult to imagine how WECK competes on the street against WBEN. Would it be a surprise to find that Entercom packages WGR's strong 25-44 with WBEN's strong 45+ and adds the anemic ratings of The Lake (which had an embarrassing Fall book) against Citadel's 97 Rock and The Edge? The cost per thousand and cost per point battles must make for interesting sales presentations, both direct and agency.
NPR and public radio stations have similar older demographic appeal and the national and local honchos are trying to figure out how to survive over the next five to ten years. In Buffalo, it seems WBFO's braintrust has looked at the ratings and trends and decided the best way to survive is to scuttle jazz during the day and canabalize or borrow syndicated programs from its AM competitor, WNED. In this regard, Public Radio seems to be taking its cue from commercial radio.
I wonder if non-political talk has ever been considered by any of the powers that be. Something that would work on FM. I don't mean E Channel pop culture crap, but more like what you'd see on late night tv talk shows. Unlike TV talk shows, you can do it for a fraction of the cost. I remember on occasion Larry King would sometimes have comedians and other show biz folks as guests on his old Mutual show and it was great. Of course if one lone show did this and got big ratings, then everyone would jump on the bandwagon(as was the case with Howard and Rush). There are probably a lot of other innovative talk radio ideas not currently being done that would appeal to younger demos, but...
Too many followers, not many trailblazers.
Too many followers, not many trailblazers.
Hot talk formats that appeal to younger males. Gee, I wonder what they talked about - probably the latest in Maxim, the latest Sports Illustrated Swim Suit edition, flavor of the month TV shows and other silly stuff. And that failed? Go figure.
How about something with broader appeal(as I suggested in my previous post). You can appeal to more than one target demo and do talk programming that is neither high brow or low brow. Again, E Channel style crap is just that - crap. I'll guess it appeals to the non-intellectually curious amongst us, but hardly anyone else.
I did catch the very first Dennis Miller show on WYSL several years back. His first guest was Dana Carvey. Highly entertaining interview. They're not the only two people in America who can do compelling entertainment based talk on the radio. Bob and Ray, Bob Newhart and Nichols, Henry Morgan and other humorous folks used to pop on NBC Weekend Monitor way, way back. There are newer people to take their place if the powers that be would look around a little. Perhaps the corporate radio brain trust should go back to the future.
The biggest factor in and changes at WHAM is likely to be Clear Channel's shakey financial situation. According to the latest Moody's evaluation, it looks like they may survive without bankruptcy. That's not necessarily good news.
According to Taylor on Radio Info, Moody's found "the CC capital structure 'remains unsustainable in the intermediate term' given the 'extremely high debt-to-EBITDA leverage of 15.2-times' as of the end of the third quarter." Refinancing some of their debt, and shuffling money with Clear Channel Outdoor allowed them to survive, but they're still hamstrung by debt and are in cost-cutting mode.
According to Taylor on Radio Info, Moody's found "the CC capital structure 'remains unsustainable in the intermediate term' given the 'extremely high debt-to-EBITDA leverage of 15.2-times' as of the end of the third quarter." Refinancing some of their debt, and shuffling money with Clear Channel Outdoor allowed them to survive, but they're still hamstrung by debt and are in cost-cutting mode.
B
Bob1370
Guest
"News talk radio demographics skew 50+. Right or wrong, agencies aren't interested in the 50-64 or 55+ demos. The mention of WBEN and aging demographics irks some readers, but the fact is Buffalo's only commercial news-talk station tops the 12+ ratings largely due to a strong performance 65+ where it garners more than a 22 share for Men 65+ and more than a 26 share for Women 65+ according to the limited ratings I've seen from the Fall '09 Arbitron"
Could this be part of the same phenomenon we saw in the 2008 voting patterns--in which Gallup says John McCain carried 55+ white voters bigtime, but lost every 18-54 demographic to Obama? Maybe news/talk demos skew old at least partly because the format itself skews to the political preferences of older voters...
Could this be part of the same phenomenon we saw in the 2008 voting patterns--in which Gallup says John McCain carried 55+ white voters bigtime, but lost every 18-54 demographic to Obama? Maybe news/talk demos skew old at least partly because the format itself skews to the political preferences of older voters...
You mean like with NPR? ;D Okay, granted, since the news these days is so inherently political, the talk shows on NPR tend to be political, but by no means all of them. Nor all the time.
Also, we had non-political talk (well, until the end) with Howard Stern for quite a while. And then with all the Stern clones, too. That all kinda petered out not too long ago, I suppose...maybe not everywhere, but it does seem that fart & lesbian jokes don't go over as well as they used to.
And technically there's sports talk, which is quite popular in most of the country. But a lot of sports talk stations have some pretty political talk shows going on for a lot of the day, and they're almost all skewed pretty heavily conservative.
cee said:
Dennis Miller's show is still highly entertaining, and while he takes a decided social libertarian/economics-and-defense conservative position, it's pretty cordial and jovial. (And now it's on FM!)
I brought Monitor up on here a few months back. That sort of programming seems like a format waiting to happen, especially as more talk heads to FM. You can cover politics, entertainment, sports, etc. in a highly entertaining and intelligent way in a variety-talk format like that.
Prediction: with the performance-tax Sword of Damocles hanging over music radio it's only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a Monitor-like long-form talk and features format.
In the 1980s ABC had an absolutely terrific variety talk format called ABC TalkRadio. WYSL was an affiliate.
And if NBC had somebody programming and producing Monitor under the age of 65 back in the late 1960s, who knows? Maybe it would have survived. While it had great production values Monitor's content frequently skewed to the 65-to-dead demo, in an era when radio was obsessed with youth as the "money demo."
In the 1980s ABC had an absolutely terrific variety talk format called ABC TalkRadio. WYSL was an affiliate.
And if NBC had somebody programming and producing Monitor under the age of 65 back in the late 1960s, who knows? Maybe it would have survived. While it had great production values Monitor's content frequently skewed to the 65-to-dead demo, in an era when radio was obsessed with youth as the "money demo."
Check out some great radio:
http://www.monitorbeacon.net/sounddownloads.html
http://www.monitorbeacon.net/sounddownloads.html
Certainly quite a bit of NPR programming carries on with the Monitor concept.
How about "All Things Considered"? Especially during their first decade, when there was a lot more subject diversity and a much lighter tone, they were homing right in on the Monitor Beacon. Nowadays ATC has become rather more conservative, somewhat ponderous and much narrower in scope.
As I understand it, ATC was also modeled on the CBC program "As It Happens", which is still on the air and retains some of its original 'attitude'.
The "Weekend Edition" NPR morning shows remind me a lot more of Monitor, and Click & Clack are just as entertaining as Bob & Ray.
Commercial talk radio hasn't favored such diversity for quite a while. It would take a tremendous investment to bring back something like Monitor. Considering the headlong rush of every type of media onto the Web, how could such prospective broadcast radio programming be made distinctive enough from what NPR already offers to make it worthwhile in a commercial context?
The original Monitor was a response to the end of 1940's-style radio broadcasting, and an attempt to compete with television at a time when weekend network TV offerings were meager. But the programming reflected the social standards of the day, when popular media were generally seen as a unifying force, emphasizing and bonding the common elements of society.
Our culture has changed a lot since the '50s, '60s and '70s. The vast changes at WHAM over the past 25 years reflect this. The "Opinion Program" of 1965 was completely different from Lonsberry or Limbaugh today. In those old days the opinions came in, now they go out. We've been moving away from unity and consensus, towards polarity and competition.
The radio world of NPR is a self-contained and self-reinforcing place, a fairly exclusive gated community that maintains a tradition of old-fashioned civility and decorum. Outside those gates, it's a Savage Nation. To move commercial talk radio back towards unifying programming styles like Monitor, the mass culture will have to develop a new interest in exploring common interests, rather than competitive ones.
How about "All Things Considered"? Especially during their first decade, when there was a lot more subject diversity and a much lighter tone, they were homing right in on the Monitor Beacon. Nowadays ATC has become rather more conservative, somewhat ponderous and much narrower in scope.
As I understand it, ATC was also modeled on the CBC program "As It Happens", which is still on the air and retains some of its original 'attitude'.
The "Weekend Edition" NPR morning shows remind me a lot more of Monitor, and Click & Clack are just as entertaining as Bob & Ray.
Commercial talk radio hasn't favored such diversity for quite a while. It would take a tremendous investment to bring back something like Monitor. Considering the headlong rush of every type of media onto the Web, how could such prospective broadcast radio programming be made distinctive enough from what NPR already offers to make it worthwhile in a commercial context?
The original Monitor was a response to the end of 1940's-style radio broadcasting, and an attempt to compete with television at a time when weekend network TV offerings were meager. But the programming reflected the social standards of the day, when popular media were generally seen as a unifying force, emphasizing and bonding the common elements of society.
Our culture has changed a lot since the '50s, '60s and '70s. The vast changes at WHAM over the past 25 years reflect this. The "Opinion Program" of 1965 was completely different from Lonsberry or Limbaugh today. In those old days the opinions came in, now they go out. We've been moving away from unity and consensus, towards polarity and competition.
The radio world of NPR is a self-contained and self-reinforcing place, a fairly exclusive gated community that maintains a tradition of old-fashioned civility and decorum. Outside those gates, it's a Savage Nation. To move commercial talk radio back towards unifying programming styles like Monitor, the mass culture will have to develop a new interest in exploring common interests, rather than competitive ones.
Lee Rust said:
You make a good point here. Back in the pre-FM days, it wasn't unusual for a station to play all types of music, from jazz to pop to country. All that changed in the 70s with specific formats, often focused on musical genres. I really believe we're in the final days of that kind of radio, because the audience doesn't, for the most part, restrict its musical taste by genres. So I'm hoping for more format diversity in the future, and hopefully formats that are structured around something other than musical genre or political POV. However, as you say, even NPR has been giving up block programming for the more narrow format definitions of commercial radio.
B
Bob1370
Guest
Lee Rust comments, "The radio world of NPR is a self-contained and self-reinforcing place, a fairly exclusive gated community that maintains a tradition of old-fashioned civility and decorum. Outside those gates, it's a Savage Nation. To move commercial talk radio back towards unifying programming styles like Monitor, the mass culture will have to develop a new interest in exploring common interests, rather than competitive ones."
If NPR's audience is like a gated community, it's a hell of a big one--with Arbitron telling us the fall 2009 cumes for Morning Edition and All Things Considered are each in the same rough neighborhood as Limbaugh's and dwarf Hannity or anyone else.
That's a gated community with damn near the population of the State of New York, folks...and growing a lot faster.
If NPR's audience is like a gated community, it's a hell of a big one--with Arbitron telling us the fall 2009 cumes for Morning Edition and All Things Considered are each in the same rough neighborhood as Limbaugh's and dwarf Hannity or anyone else.
That's a gated community with damn near the population of the State of New York, folks...and growing a lot faster.
There's no question that NPR's community is a very large one, and growing steadily. It's one of the rare success stories in broadcast radio today. It is an exclusive place, though. Educational and cultural biases, differences or deficiencies keep a whole lot of people out, and always will.
For those on the inside of the NPR enclosure, it's a welcome intellectual haven from the clutter and clatter of commercial radio. On the outside, 'some say' that it's a tax-supported country club for the Liberal elite, hopelessly out of touch with what the 'real' USA is all about, and boring to boot.
Vive la difference!
Bucking powerful cultural and technological trends for almost four decades, NPR and its affiliate stations have steadily built a loyal audience and firmly established themselves as a respected and innovative national broadcast service. In those same 40 years, the commercial radio 'industry' has gradually declined almost to the point of insolvency. The accomplishments of public radio fly in the face of any conventional wisdom that broadcast radio is an antiquated and irrelevant medium.
Somebody outside of National Public Radio needs to get back on the beam and aim for something like that Monitor Beacon or NPR may end up as the last one standing in the radio broadcast arena. That would be a shame. We need the diversity.
For those on the inside of the NPR enclosure, it's a welcome intellectual haven from the clutter and clatter of commercial radio. On the outside, 'some say' that it's a tax-supported country club for the Liberal elite, hopelessly out of touch with what the 'real' USA is all about, and boring to boot.
Vive la difference!
Bucking powerful cultural and technological trends for almost four decades, NPR and its affiliate stations have steadily built a loyal audience and firmly established themselves as a respected and innovative national broadcast service. In those same 40 years, the commercial radio 'industry' has gradually declined almost to the point of insolvency. The accomplishments of public radio fly in the face of any conventional wisdom that broadcast radio is an antiquated and irrelevant medium.
Somebody outside of National Public Radio needs to get back on the beam and aim for something like that Monitor Beacon or NPR may end up as the last one standing in the radio broadcast arena. That would be a shame. We need the diversity.
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