Last week’s demise of WCBS Newsradio 880 affected me emotionally, as it has many in our business. We share our shock and sorrow and reflect on our place in the industry.
The first thing I thought of when I heard the news last week was two years ago when legendary KGO, the Newstalk powerhouse of San Francisco, slipped and flipped. As a West Coast guy who nourished my career listening to Dunbar & Wygant, Jim Eason, Ronn Owens, and all of their talented cohorts, the death of KGO was a gut punch to me just as the news about WCBS is to many of you right now. I’m sorry to tell you, the depression will never leave altogether.
My second reaction to the WCBS news last week was to consider the imminent fate of my former colleagues and others still working at KNX, Los Angeles. Like its New York sister, KNX has served a huge local and regional community with the decades of dedication, dignity, and highly deserved reputation of its Tiffany Network origin. I’m hopeful that KNX won’t be the next all-news giant to fall. The fact that there’s no other all-news station in L.A. and, unlike WCBS, KNX has an FM signal to complement its traditional spot at 1070AM, should give KNX a longer glide path.
Forgive me for the KGO and KNX digressions. As I said earlier, a reflection of our place in the industry is what comes from the fall of a giant such as WCBS.
But while we mourn its passing we need to consider some hard realities:
Longtime residents of New York have lost a comfortable daily habit handed down through generations. They still have 1010 WINS of course, which has been beating WCBS in the ratings for some time now, though not to the necessity of 880’s extinction. Regardless, it won’t be the same for New Yorkers. And yet, New Yorkers have much bigger lives than just their radio habits. We need listeners far more than they need us.
WCBS and WINS are both owned by Audacy and located at the same street address, a weird and not uncommon result of deregulation – the conjunction of competitors that we were told to consider as “synergy”, a corporate PR word, humanly irreconcilable.
When CBS put KNX in the same big room with KFWB on Wilshire Blvd in L.A. people on both sides of the wall liked each other personally but nobody ever bought into “synergy”. We ‘howdied’ at the coffee pot and then went back to our separate sides of the floor, our desks and studios, determined to kick some intra-company ass.
Radio people are taught to compete not to share their work.
Nostalgia is a nice place to visit but you can’t live there. We can mourn the passing of WCBS and long for the good old days, but we can’t bring them back. We can only examine our current sense of value and relevance.
Let’s try to get in step.
It might be too late for the remaining giants of the news/talk radio industry. Their iconic call signs and the decades of dedication that made them the 24/7 beating heart of American information have been watered down by time, technology, societal changes, regulatory ignorance, and too many clueless ownership groups. These are complexities people working in newsrooms neither need nor care to understand.
But we do need to make personal plans, to chart our lives.
First of all, stop wallowing and start thinking. Radio today has nothing to do with its glorious past. It has nothing to do with your personal path and memories. These are not the good old days, they are what they are, new mornings in uncharted waters.
Radio people need to understand that all-news radio is now a dwindling part of the information landscape. Don’t blame me, it just is.
We have to stop touting the research numbers of how many Americans use radio daily. We have to stop defending and deluding ourselves with arguments that not only don’t impress listeners and advertisers, hell, we who work inside radio stations every day don’t believe them, either. Yes, we have listeners. How many? How old are they? What is the rising average age of declining users?
Most of all, mark this sentence: Who listens to us, why or why not? We need to get back to spending money on professional research. Explain to the bean counters this isn’t like ordering soft drinks for the studio refrigerator. Ask them how much money they justify for corporate junkets and investor perks.
None of the statistical voodoo arguments hold water for those of us who direct the programming, create, and deliver the product. We hear the PR buzz but we can sense the consequential truth. We can’t even find people in our own lives who listen to radio as they used to.
If news and talk radio are to survive and flourish everybody from the mahogany row office execs down to programmers, news staff, established talent, and wet-behind-the-ears new-kid weekend talkers must learn to become part of the new media world. We can’t keep doing things old-school while pretending social media and podcasting are upstart wannabes and that we are their aspiration. We can’t continue to rerack portions of broadcasts, post them on a website, and call them podcasts. We can’t promote “listen live” and “on demand” as if they’re the same thing. We need to take off the blinders and get back in the game.
Today’s consumers of audio information and entertainment no longer hold personal allegiances to sources. They’re in search of specific content and don’t mind pushing buttons. They select audio sources by voice command. Radio can be part of their repertoire if we’ll just learn how. We need to play catch up with the culture we always believed we led.
As an industry, we’re a bunch of old folks sitting on the porch watching the parade pass by without even bothering to wave to us. We sit and rock, silently wishing we could join them though the only things stopping us are our wistful memories, and foolish pride.
It’s too late to revive WCBS. Hell, it may be too late to save Audacy. But the only way to save radio as an industry is to evolve. We have to get over ourselves.
Or, we can just moan about the good old days while our employers shut off the lights.
Then we can rock on the porch, secure in the knowledge that we served our time well back in the day.
