As the 2024 Presidential election inches closer and closer, one could argue that news/talk radio is as strong as it has ever been. Meanwhile, the counterargument is the medium has missed an entire generation of potential listeners. At 95.5 WSB in Atlanta, Director of Branding and Content Ken Charles is keenly aware of the missed opportunity.
“I don’t think, as an industry, we’ve done a very good job of evangelizing just how relevant and just how much fun this industry is,” Charles told Barrett News Media earlier this week. “And I think we’ve missed a couple of generations and lost a couple of generations to TV and other places, because we haven’t done a very good job of being evangelists for the format, being evangelists for the medium. We’ve got some 20-year-olds in our newsroom, who were, you know, could be great TV journalists someday, but they’re here now.”
Charles pointed to news reporters like WSB’s Jonathan O’Brien as one of the younger news professionals that have found a home in news radio, and said it’s the industry’s “responsibility to evangelize to them”, but admitted, “we’ve done a very bad job of doing that”.
“We just all of a sudden forgot to talk to our next generation,” Ken Charles argued. “Just look at (Eric) Von Haessler. His listeners 20 years ago on 96 Rock are our listeners today. If they found him 20 years ago and were 18 or 20 or 25, today, they’re 45, and they’re our listeners. We just needed to recruit them for the last 20 years. That’s when I have to put on my evangelic hat, and I have to go out, and we all have to go out and we need to do a better job of evangelizing for this format, ’cause it’s there…if we did a better job of telling (younger listeners) ‘There’s something here for you’, they’d come.”
Despite the admission, Ken Charles has led a resurgence of 95.5 WSB in the face of high-profile departures. Since joining the station in August 2022, Charles has been tasked with retooling nearly the entire lineup on the Atlanta news/talker. Scott Slade departed mornings after 31 years, with morning news anchor Marcy Williams following him.
Additionally, 95.5 WSB swapped The Mark Arum Show to middays, and moved The Von Haessler Doctrine — hosted by Eric Von Haessler — into the timeslot previously held by Arum. It’s a move that has paid off, with each of the programs earning high praise from the industry in the annual Barrett News Media Top 20. Ken Charles has said the formula for the station’s resurgence has been a simple one.
“This is probably the most important lesson I ever learned, and it’s the thing that I think trips up most program directors around the country when they come into a station that’s got the heritage of a WSB, is be true to what it is,” said Charles. “This radio station was built by Greg Moceri And Pete Spriggs as a news station that did talk.
“And so I’ve tried very hard to be true to the brand and be true to what makes this radio station great, and that is we are a news station with really big, great talk personalities. The combination of the two make it what it is, and if I leaned too much one way or the other, I could absolutely break it. But by leaning into how it was built and leading into the strength of the brand, the rest kind of follows from there.
“By being true to the brand, by being true to what it was built on, and never losing sight of that heritage and history, I think has really helped me not break a great radio station,” Charles continued. “And a lot of radio stations around the country have been broken by — I’m not gonna name any — program directors who really didn’t get to understand how it was built, why it was built, and what made it successful.”
95.5 WSB isn’t your traditional talk radio station. It doesn’t feature an all-conservative viewpoint. While it certainly has those leanings with hosts like Erick Erickson and Sean Hannity, the station has become a hot-bed for talk radio that doesn’t strictly revolve around whether Joe Biden is the worst President in history, culture wars, or whether or not Donald Trump should be on the ballot in far-flung regions.
Eric Von Haessler had a history in rock radio before moving into news/talk, and Charles called 95.5 WSB the perfect station for the afternoon host as he evolved in his career.
“Maybe five years ago when WSB had Herman Cain and Rush Limbaugh was still on, and Sean’s (Hannity) show on, you know, Eric might not have fit as well, because those guys were very very political,” Charles stated. “As the station has evolved and as Atlanta has evolved and Georgia has evolved, we kind of evolved towards Eric.
“So it’s kind of a perfect storm because at the end of the day, WSB is whatever you want to identify as kind of a full-service station. We do news in the morning, Mark Arum is a talk show, really not political, but he talks about political things, topical relevant things.
“Erik Erikson and Sean Hannity are much more traditional in some ways, more political, more on top of national events, and then you get to afternoon drive, the audience changes, and the needs change…It’s time to kind of loosen up, have some fun, and unwind from a long day of work. I think WSB is a unique platform, and the perfect one for Eric, because like I said, we evolved away from some of those things, and he’s evolved towards our audience and our target demo.”
Every programmer in every format has a pet peeve when it comes to their genre. Ken Charles is no different. However, he has a strong opinion on one of the hot-button topics that divides talk radio programmers: callers.
“I just think that too many talk show hosts rely on calls to be good,” Charles revealed. “That would be like a stand-up comedian relying on hecklers to make their act good, right? Our talk show host on their worst day — maybe got in a fight with their wife, maybe hungover for a long weekend, the kids annoyed them, whatever — better be better than a caller on their best day.
“I think too many show hosts come in and just expect the callers to carry the show. There’s a reason why it’s called The Mark Arum Show or The Eric Erickson Show, because the connection is the talent, and that overreliance on calls drives me crazy.”
Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
