Valley 98.9

[Rob Landry]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2017, Scott Fybush wrote:

> It's not 1975 or even 1995 anymore. There are so many more entities 
> competing for the attention of potential listeners, and radio is just 
> one piece of that puzzle. Local ad dollars didn't go to any sort of 
> digital media back then, or even very much to cable ad insertion.

They mostly went to newspapers.

My gut feeling is that the advertising pie is quite a bit bigger than it 
used to be. Radio's share was never particularly large -- at least, not in 
my lifetime -- but radio has held its own against the new competition 
better than newspaper, magazines, or TV has.

> And how many of the local advertisers we had on WCAP or WLLH or WCCM or 
> WHAV are still around now to spend dollars on local radio?

We have an advertiser on one of our Vermont stations who's been 
advertising since 1968.

My old college station -- one of the relative handful that holds a 
commercial license -- has an advertiser that's probably been with them 
since they first went on as a carrier-current operation in 1940.

> Yes, I'd love to go back to the days (was it really only 1992?) when I was 
> one of *two* local newsrooms serving Lowell on a Saturday morning, competing 
> like crazy to get a scoop over WLLH (and if we could both beat WCCM, so much 
> the better), but I don't think those days are coming back.

Journalism is a dying profession. No one wants to pay for news any more.


Rob