More than 20 radio stations were dark for at least some time due to Hurricane Ian. Most will come back if they are not already broadcasting again, but it made me think about stations that have gone dark across the country. It seems that another station signs off almost weekly.
The most recent FCC database suggests that approximately 292 stations have been dark for over two months, including 66 AMs and 226 FMs – of which 109 are translators, and 45 are LPs. Of the remaining 72, several are non-coms with licenses held by educational institutions, such as WSUP-FM/Platteville, WI., licensed to the University of Wisconsin.
Every time the industry gets a health report, it is grimmer than the prior one, whether it measures audience attitudes, listening levels, or revenues. Eventually, something must give.
If the country enters another economic downturn and the industry’s revenue drop again, is there anything left to cut? If not, will there be a great reset? Could one more dip in revenue cause the industry to reach the point where it is no longer viable for so many stations to broadcast under the current advertising-driven model? If so, what other uses are there for the broadcast bandwidth?
The industrial centers of American cities made me think about reinvention and how it could apply to radio frequencies.
I’ve lived most of the past 30 years in either Philadelphia or Minneapolis. They are quite different places, but they have one thing in common: they are both situated on great rivers. Philadelphia sits between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. The Mississippi River separates the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Philadelphia’s founders had the good sense to keep the land along the Schuylkill pristine. It’s a parkland for all residents to enjoy. Except for beautiful Boathouse Row, nothing is built along its shoreline within the city limits. The Delaware River was a different matter. It became Philadelphia’s industrial hub.
Likewise, land along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis became its industrial center. For much of the 19th century, Minneapolis was the world’s flour milling capital.
At the time these and other American cities were founded, waterways were crucial for industrial development. Rivers provided transportation for delivering raw materials and distributing the finished product to market. Water was a source of power and a place to dump waste.
Today, of course, there are more efficient methods of transportation and (arguably) power. We no longer (at least in the U.S.) dump untreated waste into rivers, lakes, or oceans. Further, these locations are the most crowded parts of metropolitan areas with roads that pre-date modern vehicles and inadequate parking. It became inefficient for most industrial companies to remain on these sites.
By the 1970s and 80s, manufacturers abandoned most facilities on river shores in urban areas for more spacious and modern suburban and rural locations. Deserted factories and industrial facilities dotted American cities, including Philadelphia and Minneapolis. The EPA designated many of these sites as brownfields, requiring extensive cleaning and restoration efforts. Brownfields are an issue I learned about and worked on during my four years in the office of Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH).
If you’ve watched Rocky (the first one), there’s a scene where Sylvester Stallone is running along the railroad tracks that gives a fairly good look at what the banks of the Delaware River looked like by the mid-1970s. There are about 15 seconds of it opening this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZKhpbfR-LE.
Minneapolis wasn’t much different along the Mississippi River. If you live in a major metropolitan area with a waterway, chances are good that it was similar.
Prime real estate in large metropolitan areas is usually expensive. If the land is contaminated, the price must be meager. Eventually, the prices fell in Minneapolis and Philadelphia. Both cities found developers who reimagined the usage of their formerly industrialized and, at the time, inhospitable riverfronts.
Today, Philadelphia’s Delaware riverfront is an entertainment district with restaurants, parks, areas for picnics, seasonal pop-up parks, historic ships, and piers that are also recreational spaces. There is a seasonal ice-skating ring, carousel, and Ferris wheel.
The Mississippi riverfront in Minneapolis is also a vibrant entertainment zone with its Riverwalk. The largest of the flour mills is a museum that preserves the city’s milling history. Developers built condos, and apartments close to the river, making it one of the trendiest places to live in Minneapolis.
With the help of developers and entrepreneurs, Philadelphia and Minneapolis reimagined abandoned and contaminated land. Today the riverfronts in both cities represent some of the best each offers.
Are there lessons to be learned from the reimagination of riverfront property and urban redevelopment?
The U.S. is entering another period of economic turmoil, with interest rates making it harder to carry debt and little left at stations to cut. Is radio’s great reset coming?
Will we see more stations go dark or licenses turned back in? If so, AM stations will be the first to happen in mass.
Has the AM band become the equivalent of the city’s industrial sites?
Programming on AM stations continues to migrate to FM, similar to when companies left sites along the river in search of better locations.
As operations manager of WPHT-AM/Philadelphia, listening to the station at home was brutal. The coverage map showed there should not have been a problem. The head of engineering for the cluster came over and quickly diagnosed the problem. My TV, which by the way, was a high-end model, was causing interference. I even had it plugged into an electricity filter, all to no avail.
It’s nearly impossible to listen to an AM station on a radio. Almost any kind of light bulb or electronic device will create noise. The AM band has noise pollution. It’s as deadly to listening levels as the toxic waste industrial production left behind along the Delaware and Mississippi Rivers.
I’m not suggesting anything drastic is imminent. Still, I wanted to see what alternative uses imaginative people would come up with for the commercial radio bandwidth.
Next week’s column will reveal ideas from a leading voice in radio engineering, one of the brightest branding experts in the world, and an authority on human behavior who is also a data scientist.
Their answers are fascinating. That’s coming next week in part two of Reimaging Radio Frequencies.
Andy Bloom is president of Andy Bloom Communications. He specializes in media training and political communications. He has programmed legendary stations including WIP, WPHT and WYSP/Philadelphia, KLSX, Los Angeles and WCCO Minneapolis. He was Vice President Programming for Emmis International, Greater Media Inc. and Coleman Research. Andy also served as communications director for Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio. He can be reached by email at andy@andybloom.com or you can follow him on Twitter @AndyBloomCom.
