But they bill "enormously" compared to other stations with that same "1 share".
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Las Vegas Why Don't Las Vegas Listeners Care About News, Talk or Sports?
- Thread starter Gregg.
- Start date
We always say sports out-bills ratings.
We looked at Reno seriously when considering where to move to get out of the high costs, including state income tax and gas tax, in CA. Something about it, and not just the strong winters, made us look elsewhere. Boise and Provo moved up on the list, but not convincingly... although several family members are really serious about Boise / Napa.
Those are two strong motivators. And there are some very nice neighborhoods in the Reno area.
I was fine with the weather until the final two winters, both of which featured multi-week inversions where the sun did not shine and ash particles from fireplaces hung in the air. When there was a management change at the CBS affiliate in Reno and an offer for more money at the ABC affiliate in Las Vegas in the space of two days of August, 1984, I decided to spare myself a fourth brutal winter.
.,..and ended up being the new station's politics and government reporter, which meant I was back in Carson City the third week of January to cover the State Legislature.
Never been to Boise. Had visions of Provo being somehow an exurb, but a few years ago detoured on a roadtrip and went up I-15 into Salt Lake City from Spanish Fork. It was like driving the 405 from Long Beach to L.A.
As attractive as "no state income tax" sounds, it doesn't really pencil out to be that big a deal.
You and I both live in California. I had a pretty good year last year between CapRadio and freelancing for Forbes. My state income tax was roughly $2,000. That's $5.47 a day. I can find a lot of ways to save that money that don't involve moving.
The gas tax savings are significant, and more so the more you drive.
There's a 45 cent per gallon difference in the gas tax between California and Nevada. So if you're filling a 16 gallon tank every week, you're gonna save about $400 a year on gasoline just from the tax. Double that because gas is cheaper there beyond the tax (right now, GasBuddy is showing me a one-dollar difference per gallon between Sacramento and Reno).
Still, if it's $800 a year savings in gasoline, that's $2.19 a day. And people when they retire often drive less, and more of their income is exempt from income taxes to begin with.
Having freshly retired this year, I looked at a lot of this and decided that (and everyone's mileage may vary), staying put in Folsom is the best thing for us.
When I went there about 20 years ago with my brother, and again in 2015 during my move, they had a gold plated DeLorean that was so cool. Did you see it when you went?I'll add one more reason, in fact the reason I went the last time (a year and a half ago). I had somehow never been to the National Automobile Museum.
Home | National Automobile Museum
National Automobile Museum is one of the top Reno attractions with a "WOW!" factor you won't want to miss!automuseum.org
I went through one of those in Santa Rosa, CA back in the 1980s. Temperatures in the 40s and no sunshine on the valley floor for a couple of weeks straight. One day I went to our FM transmitter at 4000 ft above the inversion, it was in the mid 60s and sunny. Came back with a moderate sunburn and got plenty of strange looks from the studio staff.
I don't know why no one listens to talk radio in Vegas. Especially AM. Seems like other cities don't have as much problems with keeping an audience in this genre.
Lotus has the sports segment locked in, and I don't really know how much it's working for them. Audacy has the only two real FOX and CBS talk stations. Not a whole lot of options otherwise.
Just a recap of Vegas stations:
670am KMZQ 25kw news talk
840am KXNT 50kw news talk
101.5fm KDWN 250w news talk
88.9fm KNPR 22kw public radio
98.5HD2 100kw sports betting
920am KRLV 5kw sports
1100/100.9 KWWN 22kw sports
1230am KLAV 1kw sports
1340/98.9 KKGK 1kw sports
1400am KSHP 1kw brokered/sports
1460am KENO 10kw spanish sports
We used to have 790 KBET talk now and 970 KNUU news, along with 1140 CBS Sports. They gone.
As is the former 50 kw AM on 720.
Keep reading. We answered that back in December.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
790 is on the air with 1kW days/300w nights, primarily to allow the translator on 103.1 to operate ... it's been back on the air since February. (It had been the victim of theft while it was off the air during the Stolz bankruptcy ... someone broke into the building and took everything that could be removed from the equipment racks, and all the copper (coax and ground system).
Oh, you wanted to know why it didn't go back to talk in competition with the glut of stations you listed?
Yeah, we answered that over six months ago.
790 is not on the air at night. It is only on the air with the rap music from morning to mid afternoon. The solar panels are on the east slope of the roof, so the AM goes down well before 5pm. I wonder how that makes the translator legal. Gonna have to dig for a waiver if there even is one.
Meth head thieves are stupid and frustrating. They steal all the copper, but leave the Nautel J1000 and BE AM1, along with an FM exciter and remote control equipment. But not before cutting off all the harness cables off the J1000. Stupid.
It was heartbreaking seeing the hard work Denny Todd put into building that phasor and facility go to waste. Morgan Skinner was the brainchild for that facility.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
It may have been a waiver under Stolz, pre-bankruptcy, which carried over to the new license.
In any event, since the talk format contributed to the bankruptcy, I can see why they didn't resume that.
Also worth mentioning the flip side to staying in California if you are a home owner and bought many years ago, your property taxes are locked in at a great rate under proposition 13.
We're in Arizona and my wife and I talk all the time about relocating. I remind her that the cost to do so will be a minimum of $30,000 and likely far more depending on the destination and our property tax likely would be double what we pay now for the same size house.
Yep. And the other thing that gets overlooked all the time is the equity gain from owning in California.
I have two stepdaughters. Both married. One of them moved to rural Georgia and bought a house (4 bedroom, two stories, close to an acre of land) for $239,900.
The other kept her eyes peeled for a deal and was willing to drive a little. She and her husband live in a rural area of the Sierra foothills and she commutes 35-ish miles into the Sacramento metro most days. Her house is a little smaller than her sister's but she has more land.
They paid more for their house, but I guarantee you theirs will appreciate at a more rapid rate than the one in Georgia, the one in Georgia will top out in value more quickly, and, because of Prop 13, the property tax on the California house can only go up by 2% a year.
Georgia has no cap. It requires a written explanation of any increase of more than 15% per year and so they write explanations. Researching as I write this, DeKalb County (the eastern part of the Atlanta metro) is proposing a 27.63% increase in the property tax this year. Chatham County, which is the county where Savannah is located, is proposing a 50% property tax hike for people living in unincorporated areas.
One of my stepdaughters is going to end up being considerably wealthier than the other, and it's the one who figured out a way to stay in California.
I remember two or three of the veteran radio guys here stating in a thread about 6 or 7 years ago that -- with few exceptions -- Sunbelt cities just don't have the same news and new-talk ratings that similar stations get in the northern cities. I wonder how much that comes into play here?
I think what we said was that Sunbelt cities aren't great all-news towns.
Not including Las Vegas, the cities we typically think of as being "Sunbelt"---San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami---have some strong news-talk performers.
KPBS and KOGO are off their record highs, but still solid in San Diego.
Phoenix, on the other hand, is not doing so well right now, but KJZZ was on fire for a while there and KTAR goes in cycles.
Dallas seems to have embraced NPR with KERA but the once-mighty KRLD is barely there.
On the other hand, in the same state, KTRH is still strong in Houston.
WRNO and WWL are in a tie for 5th place in the last book in New Orleans.
In Atlanta, WSB is number two. Ken Charles never disappoints. Bodies would be lining Peachtree Street if they fell out of the top five.
Orlando is weak-ish when it comes to news-talk (Real Radio is 10th, WDBO 13th), and Miami's been soft since the glory days of WIOD (now 17th), but the NPR station is top ten.
Vegas I think is more about Vegas specifically than the region---and I covered that early in this thread:
We shall see once the A’s move to Las Vegas at the former site of the Tropicana.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
As long as the Athletics affiliate with an all-Sports station once they get there, said station will do fine. Not in the overall ratings; as both David and BigA have said on numerous occasions, sports tends to outbill ratings, because there is a group of advertisers who will advertise only to sports listeners. And in general, a station with one or more local teams as part of their program will attract a lot of fans of those teams.