demise of WHDH (AM) was: Nightcap

[Scott Fybush]

Kevin Vahey wrote:
> Scott
> 
> Detroit and Seattle still have two broadsheets slugging it out as we enter 2009.

Sorry, I should have specified "fully competitive" - Detroit and 
Seattle, as well as a few other markets (Denver, Fort Wayne, Charleston 
WV, Salt Lake City) remained two-paper towns under JOAs, Joint Operating 
Agreements that guaranteed certain levels of profit to the "failing" 
paper. In each of those cases, there's a commonly-owned newspaper agency 
selling the ad space in both papers and handling circulation, so it's 
not a truly competitive situation.

There were many more JOAs in the heyday of the form - San Francisco was 
probably the largest - but many went out of business over the last 
decade or so.

That does remind me, though, that there is at least one other city with 
two competitive broadsheets - Honolulu, where the JOA was dissolved when 
Gannett bought the larger Advertiser, the former JOA partner of its 
smaller Star-Bulletin. The Justice Department made Gannett put the S-B 
up for sale, usually a formality before shutdown, but in this case a 
buyer emerged, who's now running the Star-Bulletin as a separate 
operation, apparently with some success. (Gannett did the same thing in 
Detroit, selling the News and buying the Free Press; in that case, the 
JOA continued after MediaNews bought the News. It's an open question as 
to whether either paper can now be called "successful" - that's the 
market where home delivery is about to cease 4 days a week.)

And there's one more city with two broadsheets going at it under 
completely separate ownership - Pittsburgh has the Post-Gazette (owned 
by the Block family of the Toledo Blade) and the Tribune-Review, 
mouthpiece of Richard Mellon Scaife and all he stands for. The P-G 
dominates in circulation, but the Trib has its following, too.

> It is also possible that once the TV license was secured the HT could
> have cashed out and 2 buyers come to mind, Tribune or Gannett.
> I suspect in any case the HT would have become a tabloid (assuming
> Hearst did fold the Record) and Rupert would have come calling at some
> point.

This seems likely, though Boston would have been a very big market for 
the Gannett of the 1970s, pre-USA Today, to have bought into. I knew 
that company intimately, since its headquarters were just up the road 
here in Rochester, up on the fifth floor of the Times-Union/Democrat & 
Chronicle building. It was a modest company back then, publishing 
monopoly papers in small and medium markets and reaping phenomenal 
profit margins from them. I think Rochester may have been its biggest 
market in that era.

Once Al Neuharth launched USA Today and began raising Gannett's profile, 
the company started buying local papers and TV in bigger markets, 
swooping in to acquire major properties like the Louisville 
Courier-Journal, the Detroit News, the Des Moines Register, and the Indy 
Star and Arizona Republic as the old-line family owners were selling 
out. But that all started happening in the eighties, and it's hard to 
imagine the HT would have survived unscathed that long.

One other note on the "what-if" timeline:

If WHDH-TV had stayed on the air, and if my whole CBS/ABC swap idea 
hadn't played out in the late 70s, then 5 would still have been a CBS 
affiliate in 1994, right?

That would have set up a most interesting scenario when CBS moved over 
to WBZ. Instead of a relatively simple CBS/NBC swap between 7 and 4, 
Boston could have ended up with the same kind of free-for-all that 
Baltimore and Denver experienced, where all of the "Big 3" affiliates 
swapped. At the very least, it might have set up an interesting 
negotiating scene as ABC and NBC jockeyed for position on 5 and 7, with 
Fox potentially in the mix, too.

(This, in turn, assumes that WHDH-TV would have remained an 
independently-owned station; it's more likely, as several have noted, 
that the Herald-Traveler group would have sold out, at some point, to 
one of the big group owners of the era, if not directly to one of the 
networks. NBC, in particular, had long coveted Boston, and was close to 
a deal circa 1960 to swap WRC radio/TV in Washington to RKO for WNAC 
radio/TV in Boston.)

s