All News launches in Hotlanta

“Everybody wants ta get inta the act” – Jimmy Durante

All News radio is one of the big remaining “cash cows” in radio (mostly on AM) as music drifts away to Sirius/XM, Pandora and iDevices.   Most are run by CBS Radio

Most of the “Cash Cows” in All News have existed for decades – WCBS-AM in New York(CBS), WINS-AM in New York (formerly run by Westinghouse – now part of CBS), WTOP-AM in Washington DC (until recently owned by the LDS church in their for-profit Bonneville Broadcasting company), WBBM-AM in Chicago (CBS), KYW-AM in Philadelphia (CBS).

24×7 “All News” is expensive to do if it covers local news, and takes a long time to “catch on” – most of the people listening to it are employed people listening in their cars – if your station isn’t on their preselect buttons, they aren’t going to find you unless you spend a LOT of money on advertising (billboards, TV, other radio stations) – and when they do listen to the station, you better not be running 5 stale filler stories that were ripped from a fax from a PR firm about how green tea is good for your health, etc… and non-stop commercials for penis growth pills and make money at home schemes.  The people that listen to All News are by definition not stupid people.

So as ratings for music dry up, folks are converting music stations to all news to get into the act.   Merlin Media has launched competing stations in Chicago and New York to a tepid response and is apparently having second thoughts.  Radio One (the “Black Radio” network) is renting out a station in Houston for a new All News station – a number of All/Mostly News stations are sprouting up, some of them (like WINK-AM in Fort Myers Florida) basing their programming on the TRN/Washington Times America’s News Network.   KGO-AM (post Cumulus/Citadel merger) dropped Progressive Talk to make KGO All News.

Today’s news is the debut for an FM All-News stations in Atlanta, Georgia.   For the most part, Atlanta Georgia is “owned” by Cox Media – the company that owns the Cox Newspaper chain (including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution – called the Urinal and Constipation by Rush in his younger days) and Cox Radio (WSB-AM and a number of stations around the country), but Atlanta hasn’t had an all news station, probably at least in part due to not wanting to dilute the newspaper business.   FCC rules today prohibit a newspaper in a major city from owning radio or TV stations, but WSB and Cox are grandfathered in because they existed long before the FCC’s rules against cross-ownership of media.

The Cox in Cox Media was the James Cox, the Democrat who ran as President in 1920 with FDR as his VP candidate, following the ouster of Woodrow Wilson by the less Progressive Democrats, many of them from teh South.   He lost to Warren G Harding and Calvin Coolidge in one of the most lopsided elections in the history of the United States, getting only 34% of the vote… If you look at the map on the link above, it’s hard to not see that Cox won the states of the Confederacy, but lost the rest of the country…. but I digress…

The Atlanta metro region is a unique city if you haven’t spent time there – it has a very large, influential and well to do mostly conservative black middle class – a lot of it related to Coca Cola being located in the city – but the city itself is not doing  well with a history of bad mayors and bad choices (like letting Democrats run the city), pushing the productive people out beyond the city limits.   Crime is becoming a serious problem – Neal Boortz decided he had enough and now does his show from Florida.

WYAY-FM is owned by Cumulus and is starting All News – it was acquired from Citadel (and isn’t even listed on the Cumulus web site).    It is worth knowing that Cumulus is based in Atlanta, so this is their “hometown” station where Lew Dickey can walk through the door at any moment in order to “fix” things that he thinks are “wrong”.   The station had been running Classic Hits.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle will be providing two segments each hour, which will fill up some of the time in between the commercials.

The station isn’t technically in Atlanta – it’s licensed to Gainesville, significantly to the East of Metro Atlanta.  There are plans in the works to make some changes to move it closer to Atlanta and/or increase the power to improve the signal as people drive around the beltway on their way to work or wherever.

You can take a listen here:

http://allnews1067.com/