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WNTP: Who's watching over the operations?

J

jhguthlac

Guest
I love to make fun of the suburban stations which frequently overlook what is going out over the air. But last night I was listening to WNTP. Decent talk show. Right wing talk but intellegent, not for entertainment only.

At break time I'm listening to the weather forecast. Remember its Tuesday night. They started with the MONday DAY AND NIGHT weather, then what to expect TOMORROW (Tuesday).

I expect slip ups like this in the smaller markets. But in Philadelphia?
 
WNTP's one of the larger AM's too. That's a shame that such a careless mistake was made.
 
Even in major markets, stations like WNTP, which carry network fed talk shows, may be totally computer operated since nothing live and local goes out on the air anyway. If there is anybody in the building watching, it may be somebody who earns as much as a McDonald's cashier, or Wal-mart shelf stocker, and may have two stations to monitor at once. In Philly, WNTP and WFIL are co-owned. When one gets monitored the other gets turned down, or ignored to the point that an outdated forecast is being aired goes unnoticed.

If the weather service forgot to phone in an updated report, the software could have flashed some kind of red flag, and probably didn't.

Unfortunately, WNTP has a weekly cume of only 141,000 listeners, and WFIL is down to just 41,000. Given you were listening at night, you may have been one of a few listeners to notice a problem. It's hard to believe that during the glory days of top-40 radio, WFIL and WIBG were two of the most listened to stations in Philly. There are Philly market rim shot FMs (WPST, WKXW,WSTW) that have a couple of times the audience size of these two once legendary AMs, and WKXW, and WPST also have lots of listeners in the Trenton and NY Arbitron markets too.
 
WSTW is full market, actually.
WSJO is full market, but most fringe (as in, there should be little issue getting it in the car).
WPST is a great deal of the market.
WJBR is full market.
WXKX is more then PST, because DAC kills PST anywhere west of 476.
WBYN seems to cover well.
WRFY covers the PA side
WLEV, covers the PA side and less so chester.
WLAN, covers Chester and Montgomery.
WJKS, covers Chester, Delaware, Salem, and New Castle. No listenership or signal due to fail to penetrate buildings in Philly.

That's the rimshots in my view. Most are exagerated, it's sad that AM stations are falling to these, AM Radio stations seem to get less attention. If you go and ask someone "Ever heard of WFYL?" - You'll likely get "Is that text slang?".

Modern day and age, people act as if 1060 and 1210 are the only two existant frequencies. Yet, I listened to 1440 WNPV every single day a few years ago.

But what do I know? I've only been a radio nerd for 2 years. I'm still a novice.

AM Radio has potential - a lot of broadcasters toss syndicated shows on it and call it a day, i've even heard of some AM stations being "broken" to the point where it was stuck on imaging.
 
RadioPhillyFan said:
...it's sad that AM stations are falling to these, AM Radio stations seem to get less attention.
Click to expand...
You know the conventional wisdom: AM's audience is aging, it’s out of most advertisers’ target demo, younger folks will never tune to AM…etc. Is it all due to superior sound quality on FM? I have young colleagues who seem perfectly content with the poor audio on bootleg DVDs and cheap cell phone plans.

If someone would put youthful content on a quality AM signal then commit to promoting it, a cult following might develop. Shifting overall public opinion of AM would be an uphill battle …still worth fighting, but should have started 30 years ago. There is value to having a fresh set of eyes + ears, you should bring some of your ideas to a PD. Just temper it a bit...don't dive right in with Rhythmic CHR ;)
 
This was tried on at least one Philly station. "Skin Radio" on 1340. Turned out to be an expensive failure.
 
Build a News-Talker from scratch, everyone will tell you it’s a 10 year commitment. Build an Alternative Rock then flip it in 6mos – it failed because AM sucks.
 
jhguthlac said:
This was tried on at least one Philly station. "Skin Radio" on 1340. Turned out to be an expensive failure.
Click to expand...
Skin radio was on such a weak signal you couldn't even pick it up in several parts of the city. I could almost never get the station in Gloucester county. Since the majority of alternative listeners is in the suburbs, this thing was doomed to fail even had it been FM radio. Atleast on radio that is, I believe Skin radio is still alive online, which tells me it did get a following from the limited number of people who could hear it.

With that said, anything mainstream could never succeed on AM. You would have to find some niche programing, and hope it doesn't suceed to well, cause then someone on the Fm dial would copy it. Regardless of how good you program it, an AM would always lose to an FM. If skin radio had been on 1210, CC still would have destroyed it when radio 1045 came onair.
 
jhguthlac said:
At break time I'm listening to the weather forecast. Remember its Tuesday night. They started with the MONday DAY AND NIGHT weather, then what to expect TOMORROW (Tuesday).

I expect slip ups like this in the smaller markets. But in Philadelphia?
Click to expand...
Remember that WNTP's schedule is all network shows on weekdays and most of the weekends. I believe the same is true of sister WFIL. I imagine that the stations are basically two network switchers with local traffic and weather drop ins recorded remotely and scheduled in advance. NTP is much improved from when it started as a talk station when it ran hours of dead air, wrong programs or two programs over each other, for several days in a row. Literally, no one on staff was listening to the station.

Now that the kinks have been worked out of the automation and there are frequent local sports slots sold that likely require at least a board op, major gaffes like that are few. But, especially on the webstream, there are occasionally out of date promos, some announcements recorded at the wrong speed, occasional missed traffic slots (probably when the AM signal is carrying sports and the unattended webstream carries regular programming) and an out of date weather report or two. The weather forecast on Tuesday that included Monday's details at least spanned through Thursday, so most of it was topical despite the reference to Monday as 'tonight.'

In short, regular listeners to the station have endured much worse. The station's come a long way since its early days in the format. The over the air signal's been improved and the webstream processing beefed up so that the station is sounding quite good with relatively few major gaffes. And as you noted, much of the programming is superior for those who enjoy the genre. And locally with little talk programming of substance to choose from, that's a very good thing indeed.

But with many if not most stations unattended during parts of the day, mistakes like this are common even in major markets.
 
If the programming's attractive, I doubt a weather forecast off by a day would make anyone blink, with the possible exception of KYW in drive-times.
 
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