Randy Michaels didn’t become head of Clear Channel 14 years ago by being a wall flower. A lot of people in radio hate his guts, but a lot of people would follow him anywhere and do anything for him.
Merlin Media – his company funded by a Chicago based investment firm and partly owned by Emmis Radio started two all news FM stations in major major markets (New York and Chicago) going head to head against CBS radio – if you look up Risk Taker in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Randy Michaels.
When the rapture didn’t happen on May 21st, 2011, Harold Camping’s Family Radio was suddenly in serious financial trouble – having borrowed a lot of money for those “The World is going to end – repent before it is too late” billboards.
The reason people loaned Family Radio the money was Family Radio owned about half a dozen FM radio licenses in major markets in the commercial part of the FM band – WKDN-FM in Camden, New Jersey (Across the river from Philadelphia) was one of those stations. While WKDN-FM is a government license, it isn’t a station – it’s an FM transmitter on someone else’s AM radio tower that had a main studio waiver. There is no office, no studio, minimal equipment – but a license to ready the #7 largest market in the United States.
The station was shopped around for people who could buy it (given the FCC ownership limits) and the winner was Merlin Media at $22.5 million. The Philadelphia market has about 4.4 million people in it, so they paid roughly $4 per potential listener
Yesterday, the new owners played the song “The End of the World as we Know it” and launched the new station WWIQ – “All Hannity All the Time” (Oh, god). This is what people in radio call “Stunting” – a temporary period when the station is changing format and tries to attraction attention to itself while it works on engineering issues, hires new staff, etc – the station will eventually be carrying Hannity and Rush (CBS and Premiere have announced they won’t be renewing the contract that ends in June), and it’s widely expected that Glenn Beck will be on the station, as he is not currently heard in Philadelphia.
Very early on in Glenn Beck’s radio syndication he was living in Philadelphia and doing the show from New York – Glenn had moved to Philadelphia to be close to his ex-wife and their child. Stu and Glenn were commuting every day by car (2 hrs each way) – I’m not sure if Stu isn’t still doing that commute. In 2000, John F Street won the election as Mayor and following in the footsteps of Coleman Young in Detroit 30 years earlier – announced on election night that “This is OUR city now” (meaning black people) and the city was freed from the ghost of Frank Rizzo – setting the stage for the exodus of productive non-black people from the city.
Glenn Beck took the hint and moved to Connecticut leaving Michael Smerconish to be the king of “Conservative” talk radio in Philadelphia. Smerconish supported Barack Obama in 2008 – he knows how the game is played and is willing t play it.
Philadelphia isn’t much of a talk town. CBS’s KYW-AM does All News, and the next most popular non-music station is WHYY-FM, the NPR affiliate. WPHT-AM, the CBS news/talk station is about half the audience of WHYY, and then you have people listening to far away stations like WOR and WABC in New York and New Jersey. That’s it.
The city of Philadelphia is now 43% black according to the 2010 Census. Sean Hannity is going to take back OUR city. Sure he is.
What ever happened to wanting to be a uniter not a divider?
Well, Sean hasn’t actually said that (yet) 🙂 I assume he or Premiere had to give Michaels permission to use him for the Stunting, but I don’t know that for a fact.
It would be interesting to do a correlation analysis between which radio formats do well and the underlying demographics of education, income, ethnicity, religion, etc… there are cities with major major differences. Chicago stands out as a news / news talk town – with around 22% of all listening, Atlanta is about 13%, Birmingham AL is about 10%, more than half of which is the Sports Talk station., Memphis TN about 8%
WNTP the Salem talk station in Philadelphia doesn’t do very well? I use to listen to Dennis Preger and Medved ( when I can take him) but they they started playing those stupid-ass PSAs ! They make no sense and I quit listening because of them.
I listen to KTIE sometimes now. But now even they have started playing a PSA at the top of the hour. Grrrrrrr
I have been lookin for non-psa stations. No PSAs during Alex Jones, that’s for sure !
Is there a Salem station in Birmingham, ham, ham ,,,, ham,,,,,,, ham.
Parrott
My “rule of thumb” is that any station with less than a 1% market share isn’t viable as a business – there are exceptions for atypical stations like WBBR with are connected to other parts of a business (WBBR is Bloomberg Radio’s flagship in New York City)
Phil Boyce has a large challenge. Here are Salem’s News/Talk stations:
It’s not hyperbole that Salem is counting more on TownHall.com to pay its bills than its radio stations
Salem programs its secular talkers primarily to clear its hosts (Bennet, Gallagher, Prager, Medved and Hewitt) and national advertising in the markets where it owns stations, and to lease out the remaining time to other shows (Levin, Miller and Savage on Philadelphia’s WNTP). It’s no coincidence that ratings are sub-1.0 for most of those stations, it’s essentially by design. Boyce has that his job is to improve the existing operations, not to directly compete with other talkers in Salem secular talk markets.
Speculation is that CBS/Philly decided to cut costs at WPHT by going local with mostly little-known hosts and the likely- relatively-cheap-to-acquire syndication rights for Smerconish who had a local heritage for a decade before he sold his principles for the crack pipe ego trip of national syndication and guest slots on MSNBC as a “moderate” aka one who has no discernible political principles. As a bonus, letting Limbaugh go to Merlin lets high billing CBS-owned PHT sister station all-news KYW continue without a news competitor on FM. and Merlin gets a cheap format that makes money after so far failing to gain traction with its Chicago and New York news outlets.
The question is what CBS does with WPHT when the no-name host ‘local’ talk format inevitably fails within a year or two. Become the 5th sports talker in town continuing its current contract with the Phillies, or broker time to the dollar a hollers perhaps? Maybe Family Radio can lease the thing from CBS post-Camping.
At least we’ll get to see if Philly listeners will tune in to some of the top 10 national syndicated hosts if they’re given a chance at a daytime slot on a marketwide signal. If listeners respond, it’ll support my suspicion that Philly talk radio programmers have had their heads embedded in dark places for the past decade rather than Philly being some backwater exception to other major radio markets.
Sorry, I haven’t posted on this board much; didn’t properly close the link tag.
Per my settngs, if a post contains any link, it automatically goes into the moderation queue prior to appearing to other readers. The same is true for all first time posters.
Unless people say things that could cause legal issues, most stuff gets approved. Most readers will understand you didn’t mean “crack pipe” literally 😉
Keep in mind this is a web site for people who -listen- to radio, not people that work in radio. I don’t view what I’m doing as competition to the ego fights over on radio-info forums. I have never worked or derived income from radio and have no interest in doing that.
WPHT is a sports station. The talk shows are only there for filler when there are no sports on. 🙂
When the consolidation orgy started in 1996, CBS acquired Westinghouse “Group W” broadcasting which owned KYW, which pushed CBS’s WPHT into the shadows. While the station was an original CBS network affiliate, it wasn’t acquired by CBS until the late 1950s – CBS was more interested in the TV license.
CBS has very few stations that carry non-CBS content. Most of those are Infinity Broadcasting stations from before the Mel Karmazin era – and those stations never really fit the CBS culture.
That is a interesting chart. I wonder if the reason WGTK Louisville does better is cause they run a local show in the 12pm to 3pm time slot and Dennis early in the morning before Bill Bennett?
John Gibson at Midnight ? really? LOL He is funny.
Townhall , hmmm, Well, that little Michelle Malkin is Hot . LOL
wow, I hate to see that KRLA is low, and I heard them say they were 50k watts.
parrott
Part of it is going to be that in smaller markets there is less competition (schockingly some people still listen on a real radio). On the other hand, “Morning Rush Hour” and commute times in smaller tends to be less helpful to radio listening. The big money makers in non-music are WCBS, WINS, WTOP and WBBM – which are all-news stations. The exception is KFI-AM in Los Angeles, but that’s because of Bill Handel’s personality and WFAN in New York (We Love Sports!)
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2434153
Total ad revenue for 2011 for over the air radio per BIA/Kelsey was about $14 billion. They also reported that online advertising (not just radio) was $33 billion.