1510 talk format & programming AM & FM

[Bob Nelson]

It should be a mix of libertarian talk, sports, comedy/lifestyle. 6 pm will
have sports with JT the Brick, 9 pm comic/actress/speaker Stacey Prussman;
morning Dr K show said to be comedy.
On Jun 5, 2014 2:06 PM, "M.Casey" <map@mapinternet.com> wrote:

> Really well thought out essay by Scott.
> There's some truth to the "parasite" comment.
>
> Political talk radio, while successful when placed on a successful
> Heritage station, as a format by itself, is mostly a failed venture. So, I
> doubt any fully talk formatted station whether it be liberal or
> conservative, will ever be really successful. Maybe 5% of the population is
> really interested in politics, or listening to political debate on a
> regular basis. Some of the 95% will listen to political comments for very
> short periods of time, then back to music or sports, or for short periods
> of time, to news.
>
> Most of the Heritage stations have their own very successful morning and
> evening drive talent. Talk does OK in the mid-day period, when most folks
> are at work.   So, the heritage stations have a talented talker like Rush
> or Hannity to pull in some listeners during those non-drive times when most
> folks are listening to music on the radio, or not listening to radio at
> all. I'd say there's a case to be made that some of the more Extreme
> talkers, like Savage, might even hurt a Heritage station in general-even
> when they only run them in the evening or on the weekend.  I'm surprised
> that more stations don't pick up a program like Clark Howard to run when
> they don't have a talented local during the day before or after Rush, or to
> run in the evening instead of a Savage or Beck type. But, there doesn't
> seem to be many (or any) well done syndicated programs that are not
> political, like Clark Howard's, or even just less politically acidic,
> available. So, maybe that's why some stations get stuck with the extreme
> talkers. WTIC-AM runs Howard 8-10pm when sports aren't on.  And they have a
> talented local conservative-liberatarian, Jim Vicevich, on from 9am to
> noon. I'd like to see if Jim's number of listeners aren't , maybe, even
> better than Rush's on WTIC.  But, I'll bet that either of those mid-day
> slots pale, in numbers of listeners to the morning and evening drive
> periods.
>
> WHYN, WHAM or WOWO would probably succeed as much or better with shows
> like Clark Howard, the local talk guy,  Swap Shop, and the Mayor's show,
> from 10am to 4pm, than with Rush/Hannity/Beck, etc. And they'd probably do
> just as well with 2 talented liberal talkers as with 2 talented
> conservative talkers. Thom Hartman, though not too well known,  comes to
> mind as a talented liberal talker comparing with Rush & Hannity.
>
> I've always been surprised that radio station programmers pay little
> attention to weekends. TV has started to learn that folks want their
> wake-up show on Sat & Sun. also. But radio has gotten much worse--many more
> pay for play ad shows on than in the past.  Until a few years ago WHYN-AM
> had a live (or even taped) morning show host on Sat & Sun mornings, but
> they dropped that, so I stopped listening to WHYN-AM at all and switched to
> the morning host & music that's on 7 days a week on several of the FM
> stations.  WTIC-AM has a live Sat morning show which is great, but Sun
> morning is Ric Edelman that, while not too bad for a commercial program,
> causes listeners like me to change the channel after a few minutes.
>
> What will radio be like 20 yrs. from now?  I think many of the music
> stations will still be around. And, most of the Heritage stations, large
> and small, that maintain a degree local programming and news will be
> around. The rest will be similcasts, or specialty ethnic, religious, or
> formats that barely sell enough to stay on the air, selling spots that
> almost no one will hear. The value of radio stations in general will
> decrease. We may have another round of AM stations going off the air
> altogether and the $23,000 a month tower site rental comment comes to mind
> as a real reason for that. But, radio will continue for many years. I can't
> imagine that the (sort of frail) cell-phone system, tablets and memory
> cards will completely replace broadcast radio.
>
> Mark Casey
> K1MAP
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Scott Fybush
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2014 2:42 PM
> To: boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org
> Subject: Re: New 1510 talk format to launch next Monday
>
>
> Unlike Bob, I'm only going to say this once... <g>
>
> We have yet to see - and will likely never see - a truly fair fight
> between a "progressive" talker and a "conservative" talker.
>
> The unifying thread that links nearly every successful "conservative"
> talk station - and that is almost uniformly missing from every
> unsuccessful talker, on any side of the political spectrum - is
> "stationality."
>
> The class of stations that became initially successful on the back of
> Rush Limbaugh started with a massive head start: they were stations that
> enjoyed both the signal and heritage advantages that came from 60 or 70
> years of name recognition in their communities. WGAN, WGIR, WTAG, WPRO,
> WHYN, WELI, WTIC, WGY...and the list goes on from coast to coast. Every
> last one of those stations does fairly well (even with an aging
> audience) not just because of the syndicated conservative talkers they
> carry in middays and evenings, but because of the local news and talk
> and sports that they wrap around those syndicated shows. With decades of
> heritage to work from, many of those stations (like my local WHAM here
> in Rochester) have managed to maintain the illusion of being "THE voice
> of...wherever" even as they've slashed those local staffs to shreds. (I
> believe the WHAM newsroom is down to two fulltimers, a handful of
> part-timers, news audio from former sister WHAM-TV and a bunch of
> anchors from WSYR and WGY).
>
> Nobody in the industry is eager to do the research that would prove it,
> for obvious reasons, but I'm reasonably convinced at this point that the
> WHAMs and WOWOs and KFBKs of the world succeed these days as much in
> spite of Rush and Hannity and Savage, as because of them.
>
> Now here's the challenge: name even one "progressive" talk station
> that's been able to launch with that same advantage. You can't, because
> nobody has ever tried one, in large part because conservative talk
> showed up first and took hold at the vast majority of those heritage AMs.
>
> Probably the closest we've come in a quarter-century of the modern talk
> format has been WTDY in Madison, which had some degree of full-service
> heritage and formatics when it went leftward, and KPOJ in Portland,
> which revived a long-dead callsign and tried to inject some localism.
> But those are weak-tea comparisons - WTDY never had the name recognition
> in town that the heritage AM, WIBA, enjoyed, and it fell victim to
> in-format competition from WIBA's Clear Channel sister, WXXM. For its
> part, KPOJ always played second fiddle to the real local heritage AM,
> KEX, even within the Clear Channel cluster there.
>
> It bears noting that it's not just "progressive" talk that has uniformly
> failed when put on second- and third-tier stations with no heritage or
> stationality. Look at the failure of Rush Radio/Talk 1200 in Boston, or
> WWIQ in Philadelphia, or at the sub-1.0 numbers that Salem's talkers
> pull in most major markets (in some cases despite a fairly robust local
> effort and a heritage set of calls, such as WIND in Chicago.)
>
> We know that even now, conservative talk is a successful, money-making
> venture...IF it is able to benefit from attaching itself to the "host"
> of a well-established local heritage radio station. And we know that
> neither conservative nor progressive talk does well on its own without
> that "host." Did I just accidentally compare political talk radio to a
> parasite?
>
>
>
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