demise of WHDH (AM) was: Nightcap

[Scott Fybush]

Kevin Vahey wrote:

> I have always speculated on what the Boston broadcast landscape would
> look like today if the Herald-Traveler had won the fight to keep
> channel 5. It was an ugly case and it came down to the Globe and the
> Kennedy family doing everything that could to destroy the newspaper.
[snip]
> Had the Herald kept channel 5 it would have been the Record-American
> owned by Hearst that would have folded and the HT and the Globe would
> have slugged it out.
> 
> Would the HT have cashed out later? We have no way of knowing. My best
> guess is they would have continued to be a smaller version of the
> Chicago Tribune and might still exist today.

It's hard to imagine that Boston would have ended up as the lone market 
in the country to support two full-market broadsheets into the 21st 
century. (I guess DC sort of fits the bill, but only because the Moonies 
are keeping the WashTimes afloat despite massive losses.)

Would the H-T have done what Murdoch did with the 
Record-American-that-took-the-Herald-name and flipped it to tabloid to 
fill that niche in the market? (And am I correct in remembering that the 
Hearst Record-American, circa 1972, *was* a broadsheet?)

It's more likely, I think, that the H-T would have remained a 
broadsheet, but within 10-15 years it would have succumbed to the same 
market forces that drove a whole slew of big-city second papers out of 
business in the eighties and early nineties - the Washington Star, the 
Cleveland Press, the LA Herald-Examiner, the Dallas Times-Herald, St. 
Louis Globe-Democrat, Buffalo Courier-Express, etc., all unable to make 
a go of it against bigger, stronger competition.

The Globe was still strong enough at that point that it probably could 
have done what many of those other surviving papers did and bought out 
the competition to close it down.

(Though I suppose you could speculate that the strength of the 
paper-TV-radio combination might have helped the H-T weather the 70s in 
a stronger position than the standalone Globe; there were certainly a 
few other two-paper cities where the paper that started the 70s in the 
#2 position - the Buffalo (Evening) News comes to mind - took advantage 
of labor problems and other management weaknesses to outlast their 
formerly-dominant rivals in turbulent times.)

> Carry it one step further and what would channel 7 be like today? My
> best guess is Mugar would have sold to Murdoch to give him a VHF
> outlet in Boston. Mugar found out it was impossible for a one station
> outlet to compete against chains and O&O's for strip programming which
> prompted the disaster called LOOK. ABC most likely would have wound up
> on a UHF outlet.

Would it have been ABC on UHF...or CBS? Remember, Boston's 1972 TV 
earthquake put ABC on a strong performer in the market a few years 
before ABC finally hit full network respectability (and NBC fell into 
the dumpster) later in the decade. So if we're going to speculate that 
the arrival of Fox would have brought about some changes, I've got to 
wonder if the "arrival" of ABC a decade earlier would have changed 
things, too.

In most markets that went through affiliation swaps in that 1977-78 era, 
it was the NBC station, typically the old-line, once-top-rated outlet in 
the market, that went with ABC. (Think WSB in Atlanta or WSOC in 
Charlotte.) But in Boston, given Westinghouse's long ties to NBC, that 
wasn't happening - so if we assume the 1972 CBS/ABC swap between 5 and 7 
never happened, we'd have to wonder whether WHDH-TV 5 might have decided 
on its own a few years later to dump CBS for ABC, just as WPRI down in 
Providence and WTEN in Albany did.

(Which is odd, actually, in retrospect, because CBS was an awfully 
strong network itself in the late seventies - but ABC was the hot new 
thing, just as Fox would be a couple of decades later.)

In any event, it's not out of the question to imagine that when Rupert 
came calling in the 80s, he might have found exactly what he really did 
find - ABC on 5 and CBS on 7. But then, if Mugar wasn't selling WNEV to 
Murdoch in 1987 in real life, I don't see much in this scenario to 
change that, either. And if Murdoch REALLY wanted to be on VHF in 
Boston, the way things played out in real life, he could have - and 
probably should have - kept WCVB as part of his Metromedia purchase and 
ditched the Herald, rather than the reverse.

(OK, I'll play THAT one out, too - if Murdoch had kept "Fox 5" and sold 
the paper, the Herald probably would have folded, 7 probably would have 
stayed where it was with CBS, and that would have sent ABC up to the UHF 
dial. Two of the UHF owners then had network-affiliation experience in 
other markets, Storer on 38 and Gannett on 56, and the existing news 
operation on 56 probably would have tipped ABC in that direction. Or 
would WMUR have taken advantage of loosening regulations to try to move 
into Boston as the ABC affiliate? Assuming WMUR had stayed put in New 
Hampshire, there would have been an even more interesting free-for-all a 
decade or so later when WBZ hooked up with CBS, with both NBC and ABC 
courting 7's affiliation.)

> Radio? The station flourished under Blair and their Stuart St studios
> were a showcase. But Blair cashed out and once Jess retired in 1991
> HDH had lost its soul BUT you have to wonder if the station was still
> linked to channel 5 it would be as strong as ever today.

Having a co-owned TV station and (if it had survived) newspaper 
certainly wouldn't have hurt HDH radio. On the FM side, one wonders 
whether WCOZ would have been given as much room of its own to flourish 
under what would presumably have been more hidebound newspaper 
ownership. What was 94.5 doing in 1972, before the breakup?

One wonders, too, whether the additional news resources from the TV 
station and (maybe) newspaper might have allowed 850 to make the segue 
from full-service AC to talk ahead of the industry curve, perhaps 
beating WRKO to its 1981 flip, instead of the other way around?

(And followed to its logical conclusion, would that have eventually 
landed WEEI and sports on 680?)

> Food for thought anyways.

That it is, especially late at night!