Did CBS flip WBCN to bury programming? WBCN-AM is a station in Charlotte NC that switched from a simulcast of ESPN sports to carry Glenn Beck and others. They’re taking on the venerable WBT, heritage 50 kw station that used to blast from New England to Cuba at night.
The ratings just came in. CBS owns the top three positions with music stations. WBCN finished tied for last with zero listeners. According to our onsite fan in the area, CBS has done nothing to promote that the station exists (it is way up on the high end making it less likely people will find it by turning the dial)
Why would they do that? Let’s say CBS heard a rumor or were concerned that Glenn Beck might be syndicated on WBT. Syndication agreements are almost always market exclusive. If Premiere signs with a station, they can’t offer the same program to other stations in Charlotte). So syndication deals normally look closely at the station’s footprint and whether the show will be carried live and for the entire 3 hours. You don’t want your show “buried” at 2 AM or only 1 hour on the weekend since national ad revenue is much of what pays for the show.
So did CBS sign him to keep him away from WBT? Why would Premiere go along with that? Clear Channel also dominates in that market. WBT is owned by Boston based Greater Media – the only station in the top 10 not owned by CBS or Clear Channel
No way. WBT doesn’t *need* Glenn Beck because they rule the area with local talk. The only syndicated they have at this point is of course Rush, Coast to Coast and an hour of Boortz. They used to run the full Boortz, but then they added a 4th local in that time slot (9P-Mid) and bumped Boortz back to midnight, taking an hour off of Coast to Coast. Before that, they dropped Dr. Laura at 9A-Noon for Keith Larson.
My understanding is that WBT, whatever their ratings are relative to the rest of the market, actually brings in the most ad revenue. They do it because the local hosts all have strong followings and will make the ads for the local businesses. Plus, a higher income bracket tunes in compared to the other stations, more than making up for the numbers differences.
Now I can definitely believe that CBS set up WBCN on 1660 in order to prevent someone *else* from going into the format, or to warn off a nearby station like WGNC which just flipped to news-talk sometime in the past year, from thinking about expanding their coverage into Charlotte. But just not WBT, because they don’t need syndicated stuff.
WBT has actually set their local talent up so well that if Clear Channel were to do in Charlotte what they did to WSJS and WPTF in the Triad and Triangle respectively, and yanked Rush and C2C, they probably wouldn’t be all that hurt by it. Heck, they could probably replace Rush with the full Boortz, problem solved.
I have been hearing a bit of advertising on WBCN in the last week or so, since I asked the question here. But it still doesn’t seem like its enough.
Really I think the main reason for the switch was that there was a ton of syndicated news-talk that WBT wasn’t using, and the sports format had been doing pretty badly in the past year or two. No need for two stations of the same stuff that doesn’t make money.
They’re really blowing it by not doing a better job of putting the word out. Run some ads centered around Jason Lewis on local righty blogs, or Google searches of WBT hosts, and that ought to get things rolling. Lewis’ competition on WBT is John Hancock, who is less ideologically sound (a nice guy but he’s a ‘being a moderate is virtuous’ type). Seems like the natural place to make a dent.
By the way… WBT still does blast all the way up and down the coast at night. I’ve heard Pete Kaliner (9P-Mid) take calls from Florida, Connecticut and New Jersey in the past few months.
http://www.fybush.com/sites/2008/site-081205.html
Information about WBT’s antenna system. It includes some things I didn’t know (before my time) that WBT went directional at night in 1946 in order to allow KFAB in Omaha to go clear channel (CBS owned WBT at the time). The FCC database shows the nighttime antenna as having 22 “augmentations” – essentially trying to fine tune the directional pattern. Since the antennas were aligned to send no signal towards Omaha, that side of Charlotte (which now has suburbs) doesn’t get a reliable signal at night.
Also, WBT used to be on 1080 kHz – unlike FM stations, the antenna for an AM station has to be of a specific length to match the frequency. You can’t just change frequencies by turning a capacitor. The lower the frequency, the higher the tower. So when they went from 1080 to 1110, they had to electrically “chop off” of the bottom of the antenna system so it resonates on 1110….
Yep, the 1110 signal dies in Gastonia after the direction change at night, which is why they use 93.3 to cover that area.