Spanish-language radio (Was Re: adios WARE)

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

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Bill O'Neill wrote:
>
> I reside in (one of) WLLH's COLs.  Admittedly, I don't converse in
> Spanish.  The problem I have with Mega is their non-existent attempt
> at public service to its COL.  A legal necessity? No.  Does its
> "market" demand it?  Apparently not.
> Raises the question, why don't Spanish speaking listeners to Mega or
> other such chains demand the same quality of radio news commitment
> that, say, WBZ listeners do?  Surely Spanish speaking listeners
> deserve it, or... want it..  right?  If so, where's the market demand?

        Maybe it's been posted, but as of yesterday WARE was running the
new format from Mega.

        It's interesting to note that the only Mega station that runs an
English-language format, as far as I know, is WNEZ, 910 kHz/New
Britain-Hartford. I don't know the why of the story, but when Mega took it
over a couple or three years ago, it flipped it from CNN English all-news
to a Spanish music format. But very quickly (seemed like just a few weeks,
maybe a couple months) it flipped it again to urban, and that's the current
format. I wonder whether it had anything to do with the, IMO, heavy load of
Spanish-language radio already in the Hartford market then. Also, there was
a niche to be filled with urban. When Mega came in, there were five other
stations doing Spanish in the market plus WSPR in Springfield trying to be
a player in the northern part of the metro area. I had it figured all
wrong, BTW. I thought that because WNEZ had by far the best signal of all
the stations in the Hartford market doing Spanish, it would do well.
        Between them, the existing Spanish stations at that time pretty
much covered the range of Spanish-language formats.  And they are not all
just jukeboxes with ads. Some of them do some news-information programming.
WRYM/840 runs the CNN Spanish newscast every hour and the headlines on the
half. It has some local news in AM drive, based on the last time I listened
a while back. And, a couple years ago, it went from daytimer to 125 watts
night, which actually gives it a pretty decent signal right around the
city, and its daytime signal, although only 1 kW, is very good. WLAT/1230
has some community stuff, too. In 1997 or 1998, whenever the last big
hurricane hit Puerto Rico, it tossed out the format and started putting on
as much info as it could find about the storm. It rebroadcast one of the
San Juan stations in long segments. It put calls on from its listeners who
had info from PR. I know this because one of the Hartford TVs did its
liveshot from the radio station.
        You're seeing the start of Spanish news-talk stations in some of
the biggest markets. But since the overall numbers of the available
audience are smaller than the English audience, I think you need to look
for news and talk to come as part of less specialized formats in most
places, more like the old-time full-service AMs.