Looking Through The Windshield, Not The Rear View Mirror

It's been interesting to see the reaction from radio people on social media to the sale of WABC/New York, and by "interesting" I mean that I'm not seeing the one thing I really hoped to see.

The reactions were what I expected. Some people focused on the (low) price and made "how the mighty have fallen" comments. There were the predictable "change it back to music!" people, hanging on to the station's past. There were the people hopeful that the new owner, who, after all, hosts a radio talk show himself, will keep things as they are. And there were low-hanging-fruit jokes about the station moving to the produce department of a grocery, referring to the new owner's other business.

You know what I didn't see? None of the radio folks weighing in on the deal expressed any hope that WABC would try something really different. It was all the same old stuff. Keep it the same! Play oldies on weekends! Keep those heritage call letters! Resurrect Dan Ingram! Okay, not that, though I imagine some of those commenters would do it if they could. But it was just an industry expressing its desire to do what it's always done. No innovation, no new blood, nothing special. Just "give me back my WABC" or "keep WABC the same." It read a lot like the comments about WPLJ's demise: "give me back my 'New York's Best Rock' WPLJ" (a format that went away in 1983) or "why can't we keep it the same/move it to another frequency." Nothing new.

I know this is as much of a pipe dream as bringing back the music, but just once, I'd like the radio veterans who chime in when stations change hands or formats to look forward. Look, WABC is an AM station in an FM world that's rapidly becoming a streaming world. But let's note a few things that offer a different road ahead. It's true that AM is, for obvious technical reasons, looking at a limited future at best. But it's also notable that there are some radio station online streams that are starting to show more than a token audience in Nielsen, like KFI/Los Angeles' stream that beats some broadcast competition (yes, Nielsen is giving the Participation Ribbon 0.1 share to any station that has a single meter "listening," but some streams are well ahead of that, if not yet competitive with the big guns). We also know how limited Nielsen's ability to measure listening via streaming is; the PPM, the headphone jack, all of that has been duly noted, so it's likely that there's significant listening to streams going unreported in Nielsen's numbers. There's also Hubbard's experiment with SKOR North in Minneapolis, making an old-line AM just one prong of a multi-faceted approach that includes podcasts, streaming, and a website, digital and analog all part of one content factory. All of that is to say that if there's programming people want to hear, AM is unlikely to be how they hear it long term, but streaming and podcasting hold out hope.

That depends, of course, on both the quality/desirability of the programming and the effectiveness of the brand. WABC's brand, like so many other radio brands, has suffered in recent years. To someone in their 60s or older, it means either a 1960s-70s Top 40 with which they grew up or traditional political talk radio. To someone in their 50s or younger, it's all talk, mostly Imus (whose image will linger even though he's not on the air anymore), infomercials on the weekends, not really relevant. I assume the present incarnation is still profitable, which means that any change would need to preserve the revenue while changing to embrace the future.

Can it be done? Can WABC be revamped and updated to take advantage of streaming and podcasts in a way that brings in a larger, younger, more salable audience? I honestly don't know. I may be way off. But I would hope that the radio people who love to debate these things would add the possibility of growth and new ideas to the discussion. We -- radio people -- tend to live in the past, telling our war stories, celebrating the way things used to be, yelling at clouds and kids on the lawn. Wanting things to go back to the way things were in 1972 is, while understandable, also not constructive. Wanting things to stay the same ignores what's happened, and continues to happen, to the industry. You want WABC to survive and prosper? You want radio, in general, to survive and prosper? Think of new ideas, new talent, new ways to distribute, new everything. The business desperately needs new ideas, and dwelling in the past -- or even the present -- is not the way to get them.

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