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What are Pittsburgh's Biggest Radio Failures?

There probably would not have been lots of money to make with an all-sports format, let alone a talk format in the mid 80s to early 90s. The reason is that talk was relegated to the evening time, and stations like KDKA, WOWO, and WBZ were very successful with programming talk shows after 6 pm because of their very powerful nighttime signals.

Remember, WABC dropped music to go all-talk in May of 1987. WNBC went away in October 1988 when WFAN took over the 660 frequency in New York, and KDKA dropped music in April of 1992. They were all very successful with their music formats going back to the mid-1950s. New York radio could sustain the format due to population, and as always it takes a while for something successful in a market like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles to make its way to cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or Buffalo. The format got a lift in July of 1988 when Rush Limbaugh went national. AM Radio programmers saw the writing on the wall when FM started taking over with a clearer signal that was made for music (that could also be broadcast in stereo).

Th exceptions were KMOX with the "At Your Service" format and WLW's format in Cincinnati. Those stations weren't talk radio as we know it now. Talk shows back then consisted of in-studio guests and news segments, and rarely depended on listeners to call in to express their views.

I think that many programmers would have lost their shirts having an all-talk format back then. Remember when NBC had a talk format? There were a few breakout stars like Bruce Williams and Sally Jesse Rafael, but they didn't hit their stride or see much popularity until the late 80s or 90s? How about Double Double's talk format? It didn't last too long either.
 
corporateradiosucks said:
I can't remember...were they playing New Kids, the Cover Girls and all that 90s pop that is fun to hear as a snippet now but led to "Give us Nirvana, please God" when it was everywhere 24/7? Or were they riding the hair metal horse until it died?
Click to expand...

Energy 105 never made it to Nirvana.

Salem had bought the station...the former WYDD...in late 1989 while it was still making inroads against B94. On 1/1/90, it flipped to elevator music as WEZE, on the way to its eventual Christian Talk format as WORD (which began on 104.7 before they bought 101.5 in 1992).

I forget the PD's name who succeeded Dave LaBrozzi, but I'll never forget the quote that new PD gave Radio & Records about switching from CHR to B/EZ...

"I'm taking this baby Beautiful Music!!"

Salem wanted the WPIT properties and eventually got them from Pyramid, spinning 104.7 to Entercom in the process.
 
For the most part probably the shortest lived, lowest rated morning drive time in Pittsburgh radio history. The Harmon and Holiday morning show that bombed on Classy 101 WWCL, along with the over consulted AC packaged format that played the same songs in mixed rotation every hour. I still remember being on the air loading up the cart machines and playing the same 10 to 12 hits every hour. Those were the good old days of radio playing any where from 1 to 4 songs in row over and over.
 
In the mid-90's KDKA paired Cigna and Honsberger in morning drive and put Rob Pratte in PM drive - it was a disaster.

Kevin Miller on KDKA

K-Rock

Howard Stern wannabe "Dr. Don" on 96.9

The failed country formats of 100.7 and 104.7
 
Hertz- I don't know if I agree. Yes, I realize KDKA was half music in 1992, but WTAE was all-talk in 1988.

First point- I always wondered why KDKA didn't go all talk sooner. And really, how many people were listening to John Cigna and the K Team for the music? They played, what, one song every half hour? And Cigna knew nothing about the contemporary music he was playing- I remember circa 1987 someone made a reference to Susanna Hoffs on the air and he had to be told who she was.

That's not really a knock on John Cigna, it's just evidence the music was filler- like Perry Marshall playing a song at the top of every hour was.

You're basically asking me to believe Trish Beatty was the straw that stirred the drink on KDKA in that era. God Bless Beatty, but I doubt she would say that.
 
Now the second point, if WTAE was all-talk in 1988, how can we say all-talk was a foreign concept at that time in Pittsburgh?

I remember driving around Salem, Ohio circa 1993 and hearing small AMs with all-sports-talk formats out there.

Think of what kind of a following an all sports radio station would have had in Pittsburgh in 1992 during the newspaper strike.
 
I'm not saying that Trish Beatty was the musical force of KDKA, and yes WTAE was doing talk, but it was a fresh concept for an AM station to go all-talk in places like Pittsburgh. WTAE marketed themselves uniquely as the station to turn to for talk and as an alternative to the other stations on the AM dial that were playing music. They had some success with it until KDKA switched to an all-talk format in 1992.

Talk radio didn't really get going until the time frame of 1991-92 here in town. The thing is that in those days, and maybe still today, is that the format depended on listeners to call in. One of the big factors in that movement is the rise of mobile phones. It allowed people to call in a talk show from their car, backyard, outside of a sporting event, etc. Before that, if you were in the car listening to a talk show you either had to wait to get to where you were going to make a call or find a pay phone.

My case for Pittsburgh being behind the times stands. Programmers won't do anything unless they figure out a way that they can make money on anything they do. I think KD would have flipped sooner, but it was a wait and see approach from the corporate suits at Westinghouse to see if the format was viable. They didn't want to upset the apple cart. WBZ switched to all-news format from a music format in 1991 during Gulf War I. They saw success with that, and then rolled it out to their other stations like KD later. How many people do you know that raved about that great song that they heard on KD yesterday? Not many. Cigna's show was set up from the beginning to have a heavy news focus with news every 30 minutes. Bogut hardly played that much music when he was at The Big K either.

Bottom line is that the bottom line is all that matters to radio station owners. If they would have seen a way to make money earlier with the format they would have.

I agree, an all-sports format could have worked, but niche programming was just beginning around 1992, and there was a risk that it wouldn't have made money. When cable took off in the early 90s as we know it, you could have 24 hour all sports formats, thanks in part to places like ESPN.

Even when you think about it today, people grumble about AM dying and that FM may be the place for talk. We have 4 FM stations in town where music is not dominant to their respective formats: WESA, KDKA, WORD, and WPGB. Heck, WDVE rarely plays music from 6A to 10A, and are sort of doing the same as Cigna did and playing 1 to 2 songs an hour. If I were programming a talk station here in town, I would want it to be on an FM signal with a hot talk format ala KFI in Los Angeles, but I digress.
 
xm41 said:
1250WTAE said:
Oh yes K Bear and Rebel 104.7
Click to expand...

Were they really outright failures or were they victims of the early days of consolidation and LMA's.
Click to expand...

They were both decent radio stations, it was mostly that with Y108 also around the market didn't need 3 country outlets and the ratings were split 3 ways. Both stations still had signal issues at that point as well, 104.7 didn't become truly competitive until Clear Channel was able to move the stick from New Kensington to the north side.
 
How about Alan Cutler being added to the Pirate broadcast team?
(KDKA seems to turn up a lot here). Following in the John Sanders
mold of "use our Pirate contract to promote Eyewitness News".

Though after slogging through several years of Bill Fralic on Pitt broadcasts
I think I now have a better opinion of Cutler.
 
Hertz, there are a lot of truths to what you're saying, but it almost reads as a defense of the "Pittsburgh is behind the times" mindset you speak of.

By 1988 the "all-talk" format was 28 years old. I want to say there was a station in Los Angeles circa 1960 that was the first to go all-talk; I think with Joe Pyne as their lead talker, but I could be wrong.

Still, my mindset is a bit different from yours. To me, KDKA was a talk station long, long before 1992. Who do you know that listened to KDKA for music? The elevators and the offices were the only ones who had it on then.

But to this day you'll get people talking about Ed and Wendy King. That's way before my time. I'm not even sure when they were on! But from what I've been told it was a talk show, where you couldn't even hear the caller, and they'd repeat what was said about the caller's vacation.

I know when I started listening to KDKA in the '80s it was to listen to the Pirates and Penguins, and then I loved hearing the talk show afterwards discuss the game (which ended when Mike Levine, I believe, took over after the games in the mid-'80s, but regardless).

Ninety to six, which I think began along with the Harding-Cox election results, was a staple.

The station was 16 hours of news-talk-sports and 8 music. I used to wonder why they even bothered to play music back then. Who was listening for that?

You simply can't call Cigna and Perry Marshall DJs just because they played one or two songs an hour- and probably just as a then-acceptable way to take a breather.

To me, and I'm guessing to a vast amount of their listeners, KDKA was a talk station prior to 1992.

But the bottom line is this. It took Prime Sports 1360- PRIME SPORTS 1360- to deliever the all-sports talk format to Pittsburgh, and even then it was all syndicated and the like and wasn't going to have any factor at night. That was nearly a decade after the format debuted.

Could a station like that have been a player with an all-sports format? Possibly, but it would have taken a lot of money and more local content.

Again, every city around Pittsburgh by then, Cleveland, Philly, even Youngstown, Ohio (I want to say 1330 was all sports in the early '90s) didn't just have an all sports station, they had a successful all-sports station.

How could Pittsburgh programmers have been so blind to what was going on around them?

We can theorize- could having a strong post-game presence after Pirates games railing against a potential breakup of the team saved the franchise and city so many woes?

How successful would such a format have been during the newspaper strike when the Penguins, Pirates, and Steelers were winning so much (and, alternatively, you could have had a field day picking on Pitt in that era)?

WDVE was willing to give an hour of their music slot on Saturday mornings to Stan and Guy to talk hockey back then during the Penguins' Stanley Cup runs. KBL realized they could build an all-sports TV channel around them, but radio programmers could not?

And when WTAE did finally dip their toe into the water to possibly see if a nightly all-sports format would work in 1996, after initally doing it in 1988, they did so with . . . . . Rocco Pendola?

Still, Hertz, what you're saying has a lot of truth to it. One of the failures was Westinghouse or whoever was in charge then at KDKA to realize their "hot" programming was not playing non-threatening pop songs but rather their talk content a lot earlier than they did.
 
F.M.Hertz said:
I'm not saying that Trish Beatty was the musical force of KDKA, and yes WTAE was doing talk, but it was a fresh concept for an AM station to go all-talk in places like Pittsburgh.
Click to expand...

It was? WJAS was all talk from 1968 to '72 with Merle Pollis, Ted Payne. Perry Marshall, Joe Gearing, Mike Silverstein and others. The format was almost completely local content. WEEP was all talk in 1975 and '76 with Mike Levine, Jack Wheeler, Roger Willoughby Ray and others. They were 100% local. WTKN (WWSW-AM) took a shot at all talk in the early 1980s. They were the ones who brought Hoerth to town from Florida. They also had Scott Cassidy.
 
Some other failures I see.

Whoever it was that told Rush Limbaugh that he wasn't any good and sent him back to Missouri.

Imagine instead if in 1975 Rush had a conservative talk show to kick in the KQV all-news lineup? That would have been huge!

Furthermore, I believe Pittsburgh was the next-to-last major city (behind Philadelphia) to pick up his show and run it live. WTAE ran it on weekends tape delayed for awhile around 1990 and I always thought they missed a major opportunity to carry him live back then.

WTAE was a truly great talk radio station, but I think we can trace the beginning of the end for them to when they said no to Stan Savran and Rush Limbaugh and yes to the likes of Sally Jessy Raphael.

Number two- Scott Ferrall. Speaking of KQV, here was a guy who was the sports director of that station and then four years later was nationally syndicated and probably the biggest sports talk show host in the country.

Just consider that- Scott Ferrall was the sports director of KQV in 1991, went the nomad route for a couple of years, then was nationally syndicated by 1995!

Yet Pittsburgh still couldn't figure out how to have an all-sports radio station by then on a major frequency. As Hertz pointed out, they were playing music- MUSIC!- on KDKA as late as 1992!

I'd heard through the grapevine that Ferrall was wild back then. So what? Was he any wilder than any other number people in the market that have been arrested, walked out on their job, threatened people, been tempermental to the point of violence, abused substances, etc.?

Imagine if a station HAD built around Ferrall then. Don't give me the "Well, Pittsburgh tends to have more traditional tastes and Scott certainly wasn't traditional." Neither was/is Mark Madden. Neither was/is Alan Cox. Neither was/is Scott Paulsen, but they certainly had or have large followings here.

Imagine if you had Madden and Ferrall on during the height of the Lemieux era in Pittsburgh. You have any idea how fun that would have been?

But no, here in Pittsburgh radio programmers instead sought out talent such as Thor Tolo. John Corby. Rocco Pendola. Bruce Keidan.

In my opinion, these decisions are far bigger local radio failures than even the dismissal of Bob Prince.
 
Pratte4Life said:
Imagine instead if in 1975 Rush had a conservative talk show to kick in the KQV all-news lineup? That would have been huge!
Click to expand...

Assuming that in 1975 he was conservative or had any interest in politics at all. What was Jim Quinn like back in 1975?
 
WASP 1130 Brownsville for Giving up the Country Format and the "Bee Line" Show.

WESA 940 / 98.3 for Giving up on the Mon Valley.

WWCS 540 for Dropping the Oldies Format Using Zek Jackson and the Great Mix Of Music Provided By "Beans" From D&J Records.

As you can See I'm An AM Radio Person.
 
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