Personality Crisis: Will Cost Cutting Save Radio?

by Paul Heine and Katy Bachman
MediaWeek.com

FEBRUARY 11, 2008 -

"shut up and rock!" screams a message on the Web site of WEBN-FM in Cincinnati. The shut-up part of that order at the iconic Rock station is being taken quite literally.

Late last year, Clear Channel canned 12-year WEBN midday host Ken "Mr. K" Glidewell and replaced him with a personality who doubles as one of several co-hosts on the station's morning show. The dismissal was part of a massive wave of layoffs in at least 20 markets that gave a wholly different meaning to the company's Less Is More mantra.

While the numbers varied from market to market, the results were alarmingly similar: on-air jobs eliminated, positions consolidated, air shifts radically extended, personality teams split up and more dayparts yielding to voice-tracking and syndication.

What's so shocking is that those on-air cuts may be only the beginning. Just a few weeks ago, a CC edict came down from the top to freeze all budgets—including monies set aside for research, advertising and promotion—for first quarter, and possibly longer.

When the nation's largest radio group makes deep cuts to boost the bottom line, you know the radio business is challenged. Radio revenue, following several years of practically no growth, took a turn for the worse in fourth quarter last year, a condition that is bleeding over into first-quarter 2008. Despite radio's efforts to stimulate a second revenue stream from digital initiatives, reluctant advertisers and a looming local recession seem to be working against a prompt turnaround.

One of the industry's chief money savers is voice-tracking, the practice of prerecorded on-air disc jockey patter spliced together with music, commercials and other elements. Pioneered by Clear Channel in the late '90s at the height of consolidation and widely embraced by the industry, voice-tracking sacrificed the jobs of countless overnight personalities years ago. Now the practice is spreading to nights, middays and afternoons. Often, voice-tracking is used across dozens of markets, similar to syndication.

And there's a new budget-cutting trend: one jock covering two dayparts. Clear Channel is stretching midday shifts to an unprecedented seven hours on some music stations, especially those popular with workplace audiences. For example, in Chicago, Melissa Forman hosts both the morning and afternoon drive-time shows on Adult Contemporary mainstay WLIT (Lite FM). Jim Shafer and Jen Byrum do the same at Adult Contemporary WLYT-FM (Lite 102.9) in Charlotte, N.C., under the aptly named bookend handles, AM Carolina and PM Carolina.

The result is that some stations are getting by with only three hosted live shows: mornings, middays and an extra long afternoon drive.

No doubt the reductions and changes in radio's on-air talent will help save money. It might even have little effect on the ratings. But in the long term, fewer personalities may serve to commoditize the medium and render its content less distinguishable from an iPod or a low-budget Internet radio station. "What do we do to differentiate ourselves?" asks Steve Goldstein, executive vp and group program director for Saga Communications. "It's counterintuitive, even alarming, that broadcasters might sack talent and turn their stations into jukeboxes precisely when music is available from an array of other sources. We need to put our vision hats back on because we're not going to cut our way to success."

One program director, whose station operates without jocks in nights, overnights and on weekends and who asked not to be named, warns that radio is in for "a rude awakening" when wireless Internet brings thousands of new radio choices to the car. "The only defense is live and local. We have to develop personalities that can hold a conversation on the radio and be entertaining. Unfortunately, as an industry, we've done a horrible job at that."

Perhaps it's just the state of radio today. "Radio has been homogenized so much that there really aren't personalities," says Rich Russo, director of broadcast services for JL Media. "The radio DJ is supposed to be your friend, the guy who gets you through the night or takes you on the drive home. I don't know if they should come back or not. I don't know that if stations go away, anyone cares if they're gone."

"Personalities just don't stand out like they used to," echoes Maribeth Papuga, senior vp and director of local broadcast for MediaVest. "There will always be some high-profile layoffs, but the ratings don't always show it. We don't know if there's any impact because with the diary it takes at least six months to see any impact."

Program directors defend the expanding use of voice-tracking and longer shifts as a way to adjust to shifting audience-listening practices. They insist that cost cutting isn't the only motivator. "We look at how people use the station—when they're tuning in and out, how long they listen, their commute times and when they start their workday—to paint a picture of the audience. Then we give them the best talent, whether they be live and local, syndicated, voice-tracked or whatever," says Clay Hunnicutt, regional vp of programming for CC in Atlanta. As for the new marathon air shifts, he adds, "Some talent can handle a longer shift and some can't."

"Studies show that music comes first for the Adult Contemporary listener," says Stella Schwartz, programming director at KOST, CC's Adult Contemporary in Los Angeles. "So we adjusted our air shifts to better match those audience patterns."

Read more HERE!

Programmer Stella comments:

Quoted Text

""Studies show that music comes first for the Adult Contemporary listener," says Stella Schwartz, programming director at KOST, CC's Adult Contemporary in Los Angeles. "So we adjusted our air shifts to better match those audience patterns."

Ironic how the application of those studies results in fewer ratings, fewer advertisers, less revenue and a choked medium.

Is this not another example of: finding out what doesn't work -- and doing it harder...?

Quoted Text

A big sales tool is the DJ chatter and having the personality show up to a remote. So if you start chipping away at that, it eliminates part of the medium's attractiveness," says Mary Barnas, executive vp and director of local activation for Carat. "A lot of our clients do remotes, but it's getting harder to get stations to partner up with."

I started out as an Op at a big FM AC and AM in Vancouver... a station will virtually no local/live personallity and whenever there was a remote, the PD would do it even though he was not an on-air host.  In fact, his only "character" on the stations was selling things live at such-and-such store.

I am confident the the internet will make a big difference for local radio and a very positive one.

I think that in order for radio to reap any benifits from online streaming, they (we) need to create the infrastructure for online listening.  A place to gather ears and send them to their music streams.  NPR in the US is starting with an aggregate. http://www.npr.org/music/

For example... instead of going to CFOX.com and getting the CFOX stream...

You'd go to a CorusRock.com or some nonsence where you not only get CFOX, but the Edge... ALL the streams from all the Corus rock stations... ALL the podcasts produced by all the stations on the network plus... as many niche music streams as people care to program.

Include music news, interviews, videos, downloads and a "pandora" type program to explore even more music and you're laughing.  Every station in the network gives a little bit (Vancouver and Toronto would be giving a bit more) to the site to create one massive, comprehensive Canadian music website.

Just an idea...

all this typing about radio needing to collect ears and then give them what they want got me thinking about a book I read by a dude named Chris Anderson called "The Long Tail."

So I clicked on his blog and he had an interesting article that I am sure Buzz would love to read about podcasts and how Chris consumes radio.

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http://www.longtail.com/
Narrower is better (dark thoughts during NPR pledge week)
by Chris Anderson


Around these parts it's NPR pledge week, which used to mean that I'd spend even more time in the car on the cellphone to avoid having to listen to my local affiliate's endless fundraising guilt trip. But now that I've switched to an iPhone, I've noticed a different behavior. I'm listening to more and more of my favorite NPR shows (This American Life, Terry Gross's Fresh Air, Science Friday, etc) as podcasts, something that finally suits me thanks to having a phone that automatically loads the latest shows. I don't have to avoid the NPR pledge drive anymore.

At the beginning of each podcast Terry Gross tips her hat to the local broadcast affilates, which is nice but otherwise pretty pointless. But every now and then Ira Glass (pictured), the host of This American Life, reminds us that the bandwidth bill for these free podcasts is more than $100,000 a year, and encourages us to go to the show's website to donate something to offset that. And I just did that, donating $50 in a week when I'm ignoring my local NPR affiliate's plea to do the same.

Why? Well, in thinking about it, I realized that I don't really support my local affiliate. I love some of the shows it broadcasts and hate others (have you heard the California Report? Dreadful). My attachments are to individual shows, not to a broadcast station. My engagement with public radio is at a more granular level than the affiliate. I just don't care that much about KQED, and now that I've got another way to get the shows I like, I don't really feel much of a connection to it.

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don't have to take the bad shows with the good. I've got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it. My feelings about radio stations are mixed, but my feelings about individual shows are crystal clear.

What if everyone did what I do? Well, both radio-via-airwaves and radio-via-podcast are free, and both can appeal directly to contributors to help pay their bills. Of course most of This American's Life's costs are covered by affiliate syndication fees, and if the affiliates couldn't pay those, it would take more than an online tip jar to pay the costs of making the show. And obviously those who don't have access to podcasts would be hurt if public radio broadcasters shut down.

But look at the arc of history here. The podcast model is getting cheaper and more ubiquitously available (who doesn't have a cellphone?), and it serves individual needs and taste better. Meanwhile the broadcast model, which is all about one-size-fits-all taste, is based on human labor costs and costly transmission equipment and is only getting more expensive. You can see how this story ends.

My shifting of funding from the general (radio station) to the specific (show) tells me that radio is going to get microchunked, just like the rest of media. The more granular, the better. We're about to find out where people's loyalties really lie.