Kabc missed a golden opportunity to experiment after mr mcintyre signed off. Dont know what they should have flipped to but it should have been on jan 1 2019 or dec 1 2018 with a month of christmas music. Kabc is spinning there wheels and gettin no where.
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What format *should* KABC-790 have
- Thread starter radiocph
- Start date
A month of Christmas music on AM in the land of KOST would have driven off the few remaining listeners.
I don't see how they could "experiment" as their main issue is an inadequate signal.
In CA, that does not leave very many people.
I think mr mcintyre leaving got rid of the few listeners they had left. I am gone and will never listen again anytime of the day.
Game shows. Soap operas. Same thing the geriatric crowd watches on TV during the day. Let them have some fun, interact and be rewarded for their participation. Keep the brokered weekend programming.
More expensive to create, unless you just air the audio portion of TV shows.
In the late 80's, KFRC (AM) in San Francisco tried a game show format because their once #1 rated Top 40 format had cratered in popularity due to FM competition. Contestants would call in to play. Given the scope and budget of radio, the prizes were things like toaster ovens. In keeping with TV game shows, there was a lot of recorded happy-music and sound effects.
I listened for 10 minutes once and got a headache. It was awful. Some of the worst radio I had ever heard. IIRC, the format lasted about a month
Of course NPR has had some success with their game show Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. Very popular weekend show for public radio. No equivalent I know of in commercial radio.
I don't know, but KABC's ratings REALLY went into the toilet after Larry Elder was dropped from their lineup ........... [now where's that emoji selection now that I need it?? ]
Oh, Llew, if it had only been a month.....it was SIX. And that was long enough to cause serious damage. In the book before the Game Zone, KFRC was in 8th place with a 3.1. In the first book after, 20th with a 1.9 and at the end, 22nd with a 1.7. KFRC never recovered until they changed format to Adult Standards.
Old time radio? Jack Benny, George Burns, Dragnet reruns? CBS Mystery Theater?
The audience for that is small, unsalable and/or dead.
People who like the old radio shows tend to have been kids at the time of the original airings. Those who were adults at the time don't seem to care or didn't when I asked them 40 years ago. Since the former are now in their 80s, the latter are pretty much gone now.
Ironically...or perhaps "6 degrees of"...something, I remember that in my childhood (1960's) - KABC ran old radio shows on the weekends, for awhile. At the time, "old" meant just 20 years or so before - but I remember hearing Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow, and a few others on KABC.
SiriusXM still has an old-time radio channel. I was rather surprised when that channel was retained while Book Radio, devoted to audio books, was killed off in favor of RFD Radio, agriculture news. Probably a case of SXM taking money for one channel vs. paying money to program another, since just about every channel on the service can be branded or bought outright if the price is right.
The problem is that KABC is a small-signal AM station and the area it covers well is predominantly ethnic.
We know that Blacks and Hispanics use AM even less than non-Hispanic whites do, and there are already quite a few Asian language options on the air in LA. That really does not leave anything obvious that fits the more limited coverage and the composition of the population in the places it covers well.
West LA has a decent Iranian population--you think a Farsi format would give KIRN-670 a run for its money?
Or how about Jewish radio programming?
NPR Talk skews younger... only when you compare it to the classical and jazz programming that most NPR outlets were doing before switching to talk. There's lots of grey hair at a Wait Wait taping.
If you're selling NPR underwriting, you're selling qualitative numbers, not quantitative. The demos aren't great, but the audience likes to buy stuff.
Honestly, after you've sold the real estate, the next step for KABC is to sell the license and make its coverage issues someone else's problem. Until then you take whatever revenue you can get.
As for getting younger audiences interested in talk programming, that's called podcasting, and since you can swear on the internet and the commercial reads are less frequent they're perceived as more "authentic."
If you're selling NPR underwriting, you're selling qualitative numbers, not quantitative. The demos aren't great, but the audience likes to buy stuff.
Honestly, after you've sold the real estate, the next step for KABC is to sell the license and make its coverage issues someone else's problem. Until then you take whatever revenue you can get.
As for getting younger audiences interested in talk programming, that's called podcasting, and since you can swear on the internet and the commercial reads are less frequent they're perceived as more "authentic."
AQH is usually very good. People tune in and rip the knob off.
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