Re: Last gasps of WQEW

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Dan Strassberg wrote:
<snip>
>I'd say that the company most likely to be able to make an AS station work
>in the New York market is Buckley. Conceivably, the station could be an
>addition to the WDRC simulcast, but with its own local news content--either
>produced by WOR or purchased from Metro or Shadow or whoever. I think that
>WOR's sales staff could succeed at selling an AS station as a combo buy with
>WOR. There is not that much difference in the demos of the AS audience and
>the mature end of the New York talk audience, to which WOR caters. Yet the
>programming preferences of the two audiences are radically different. A buy
>of WOR plus an AS station ought to offer low duplication of listeners. Now,
>what are the chances that Buckley would be willing (or able) to offer Liu
>the $25 million that almost certainly constitutes the lowest price at which
>he'd sell WPAT?

        Buckley very well could be the best company to try to do AS, but,
IMO, that's separate from trying to bicycle the WDRC programming into NYC.
I don't think that would work. The morning guy, Brad Davis, is mostly talk
and locally oriented in that. I don't think he would translate well out of
his market and like so many talk hosts (think Howie Carr) he would lose the
flavor he has by giving up the local stuff. One reason that what they're
doing now works is that even though it takes four stations to do it,
they're basically covering just the Hartford metro market.
        IMO, Buckley could just hire most of the WQEW staff if it wanted to
get into the AS business. I don't think you could be really successful in
NY with just a bird-feed AS station, and I think Buckley keeps showing that
it has the smarts to figure out stuff like that.
        OTOH, if Buckley wanted to put on another station in NYC, wouldn't
it be more likely to go for a format to bring it a demographic it doesn't
have now? In other words, younger? While the individual listeners may not
be duplicated that much between WQEW and WOR, it's been pointed out that
the demographics have definite similarities.
        The best signal, even better than WPAT, that seems as if it might
be available is WEVD, although I don't know the economics of that.



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Have you patronized the skywave signal of an AM Class A station today?

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