Wait, Donald Trump is gone, it’s not an election year, radio is “dying”, yet some folks think investing in radio in 2021 is a good thing?!
Stop the presses! This can’t really be happening! There’s no more good news in the talk radio landscape!
Oh, but that’s not what happened this week in St. Louis, with the announcement of a news talk radio station in “NewsTalkSTL” on the K270BW 101.9 “Real Talk 93.3” KRTK.
This now gives St. Louis four viable talk stations in KMOX News Radio, 97.1 FM Talk, 550 KTRS, and now NewsTalkSTL who will all be competing for a similar audience and a similar advertiser.
If you were to listen to the pundits, this would be suicide for NewsTalkSTL and their investors and founders would be some of the dumbest people in media, stuck in the stones ages, who must enjoy losing money.
So, they have got to be doing this on a shoe-string budget and putting on mostly syndicated programming and see how it works out, right?
Wrong.
Outside of Westwood One’s Dan Bongino from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., the station will feature lots of local voices from 5:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. And not just any local voices, but local voices that, in some cases, the station stole from their competition. Local, well-known voices will include Mike Ferguson, Vic Porcelli, Tony Colombo, and Tim Jones. The St. Louis market knows these names and will be able to connect with them off the bat.
And by the way, therein lies the keyword: competition.
Yes, more competition in our crazy world of talk radio is a great thing, and St. Louis is getting just that on the local level.
As co-owner Jeff Allen told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “When people tune in, they’ll hear voices that they know and trust talking about the issues that impact their city.”
As a Top 25 market, St. Louis will now have four stations in competition, and all four provide quality, local content in their own right. Each station can stake its claim as being unique and different from the rest of its competition, but the fight for ad revenue will only grow.
This will require programming and sales to be a cohesive unit and work hard for every client.
If NewsTalkSTL ends up being a success, it’s a story worth telling and telling often across the media landscape. Because for too many, the only story they like to tell with radio, it’s the impending doom and the demise. That gets them more clicks. Granted, that might be true for news in general. If it bleeds, it leads, right? And the story of radio bleeding has been an easy one to tell in recent memory.
However, while we don’t know how NewsTalkSTL will do, we do know this much: some smart and wealthy people thought the market could handle another news talk station and believed it was a wise idea to invest in it with local talent.
So, maybe they really are a bunch of foolhardy investors about to lose their skin. Or maybe they’ll be the ones getting the last laugh.
Pete Mundo is a weekly columnist for Barrett Media, and the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. Previously, he was a fill-in host nationally on FOX News Radio and CBS Sports Radio, while anchoring for WFAN, WCBS News Radio 880, and Bloomberg Radio. Pete was also the sports and news director for Omni Media Group at K-1O1/Z-92 in Woodward, Oklahoma. He’s also the owner of the Big 12-focused digital media outlet Heartland College Sports. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
