Explanation for the idiot in the room [meaning, me] So the higher the number means better ground conductivity or the lower? Stuff like this makes me wish I had gone ahead and gotten my First Phone license.
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WTAM
- Thread starter skiwest
- Start date
This is more symptomatic of the format than among talk stations owned by a specific owner. WJR (Cumulus) has had a brokered/specialty weekend lineup for nearly 20 years. WPHT in Philadelphia (Audacy) is heavy on infomercials/brokered fare on the weekends and they carried Syd Mark’s Sinatra show until he died a few years ago. WOR (iHeart) is nothing but infomercials, sometimes running the same one three times in five hours. Even WLW has some sponsored fare nowadays. You might as well do what you can to make a quick buck when people, quite frankly, aren’t likely to listen to your station anyway.
WABC is the only talk station I can think of at this point that has no infomercials at all… and it is run as a total loss leader by the owner of a rather successful supermarket chain.
Ch-ch-ch-chia.I was listening to the gardening show a few years ago. A guy called in and asked Angelo if Miracle-gro would work on his bald head.
Where do you guys see AM radio in Northeast Ohio heading in the next few years?
Higher numbers mean that signals are conducted better.
In parts of the Great Plains, where conductivity is around 30, a 5 kw station on the lower half of the dial will cover vastly more area than, lets say, WSM in Nashville or WSB in Atlanta which are both in terrible low conductivity areas.
Where I live, in pure desert, the conductivity is estimated at 0.5 but in measurements is even less. There is a 10 kw mid-dial station that does not even cover this small valley which is less than 30 miles long. There is a 5 kw station on 970 at one end of the market and it only has a good signal to about half-way to the northeast.
There are a couple of 5 kw stations in the Dakotas on low frequencies such as 550, 570 and 600 that cover pieces of four or five large states in the daytime because the conductivity is so superior.
First Phone won't teach you that kind of thing. In fact, the old First Phone was truly a license to be quite dangerous around electronics. I know horror stories about damage that some have done to stations. I'm a truly mediocre engineer myself, and I've had to fix stuff that "first phoners" have done to stations that is horrendous.
If you mean just Cleveland, keep in mind that only one local signal covers the whole market, and it will continue to survive but grow older in appeal.
Outside of Cleveland, whether it be Sandusky or Ashtabula or Akron or Canton or the smaller towns, AMs with no translator will eventually close and turn in their licenses.
This is 100% correct. Bill Wills and Mike Snyder are in their late 60s and I have no idea who'd replace either when they do retire. Or if the remaining audience will want to listen to the news wheel when they're gone. I wonder sometimes if WTAM will survive another 3-5 years before their demo problem becomes almost untenable and it winds up being run off the bird almost entirely.
One thing that happened after Ideastream took over WKSU and did the format merger with WCPN... WKSU has been climbing in the 12+ beauty pageant ratings over the past few months. Certainly neither NPR station did well prior to that as they were competing against each other with substantial overlap. So of course WTAM has competition in the news arena now that they hadn't had prior.
Angelo Pettiti's garden store chain advertises a good deal in the area on both radio and TV. The radio show is basically brokered (it originated at different stations over the past 40 years before moving to WTAM a decade ago) but he has fun doing it.
That is a likely scenario.
When I got into local radio as a go-fer in Cleveland, the market was 10th or 11th nationally. It is now the 35th largest radio market per the Nielsen definition. Revenue will have fallen nearly 20% in 7 years, even after a projected post-pandemic recovery for 2024.
So now even Cincy is a bigger market.
And that means that there is not a lot of money to put into an AM station. However, looking at WLW it's important to note that local direct is the sustaining element. There is a lot less national agency business outside the Top 10, 20 or 25 markets, and local business is far less sensitive to demos and statistics.
The disadvantage of WTAM is that it has a very inconsistent and tarnished heritage. It has had more call letters and formats and owners than I can even remember, and if WLW is like University Circle , WTAM is like the Severance Center.
Yes, that's right. I'm talking programming. Although the quality of WJR has slipped somewhat these days (as has just àbout every commercial station with cuts cuts cuts) they have a really respected news department plus personalities like Paul W. Smith and Mitch Albom daily. Both those guys are well read and play it smart instead of tabloid. I know that really good talent like that is pretty rare on local radio these days and it's a lot easier to just p*ss people off and say outrageous things and call it entertainment.
WJR is in market 13, while WTAM is in market 33. WJR bills nearly twice as much as WTAM, and that allows them some programming luxuries that a Cleveland station can't even consider.
Bloomdaddy probably goes to mornings, and D-Man goes to afternoons, with evenings patchwork due to having Cavs/Guards as blankets to cover most nights
1100 has been all-talk since 1985 and they kept blowing up the lineup repeatedly until renaming themselves WTAM again. Sometimes they HAD to (like when Gary Dee's antics threatened the license so WWWE was traded to Booth American for WRMR).
But one wonders what would have happened had Jacor not gotten cold feet after Pete Franklin defected to New York (and WFAN) and actually bought WWWE back in 1987. Would Randy Michaels have tried to make WWWE into another talker like WLW and had two ... "big ones" on his hands? We'll never know.
Should Bloomdaddy go to mornings, he'll be regionally syndicated again. He's already doing a 9am hour-long show for WWVA.
And even then, there's a good possibility WTAM be all-syndicated after 9am (taking into account Jimmy Malone retiring). The economics in 3-5 years might not support a local show in afternoon drive, let alone my doubts on if someone like Dennis Manoloff would WANT to host afternoon drive.
Interesting that Youngstown can support local in afternoon drive, while Cleveland cannot.
I did not know that. Interesting question that likely only ultra-insiders could answer.
My suspicion is that WKBN has enormous tradition in the market and whatever the call letters on 1100 in Cleveland does not. Yet WTAM bills about 5 to 6 times as much, and can't support more local programming.
Cleveland certainly has a history of interesting and controversial politicians, plus its share of major league sports stories and curiosities... and the eternal issues of contamination, old industry, flammable rivers and the like. Plenty of talk radio fuel.
So, there is plenty of fuel for good local talk.
Pretty much. Midday host Dan Rivers has been at the station for 41 years, and took over for Dan Ryan (who also had a long tenure) after he died in 2002. Afternoon host Ron Verb has been at WKBN for well over 37 years.
And, just as we saw with the staff at WHOT, there are a number of people in that market who opted to stay there among friends and family in a place with lower cost of living.
It's a matter of lifestyle. My father moved from his first job in New York City to East Liverpool, OH, to manage a porcelain factory. He could not adapt to the smaller town, and moved to Cleveland in the early 1920's. He liked Cleveland, and stayed there for nearly 40 years until he passed away.
Years ago, WKBN was a station I listened to a lot at night. Daytime, came in great but a lot of noise from other junk leaking onto that frequency. Now the signal is basically a rumor in my area and even if I sit in the middle of my parking lot at work with NO electrical noise and my car off, it's mostly a whisper at night, if that. The tower's only 56 miles away from me.
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