Choose Your Own Adventure

Okay, then, what would you have done?

You have a once-mighty AM station struggling for years. What do you do with it? I'm not asking this in order to defend anyone or deflect from considering decades of bad decisions. I'm sincerely asking what you'd do, because this will come up again and because it will have a bearing on the future of a significant portion of the spoken word audio world.

We're obviously talking about what happened to KGO/San Francisco, and the reaction from many in radio to Cumulus dropping the News-Talk format and going with all-syndicated sports betting talk. I don't think I need to give you a detailed history of KGO's decline, but I'll note that the slide goes way back to even before the PPM changed how radio ratings are measured and it was the same story as so many other heritage AM talk stations: The audience was rapidly aging, younger listeners have no use for AM, agencies don't want to buy ads to reach the 55+ audience, and as the older audience died off, they weren't being replaced by new, younger listeners. By the time the ill-advised flip to all-News and flip back to News-Talk happened, there was nothing the station could do to reverse the trend.

Or was there? Why have some other heritage AM talkers -- KFI, WLW, KOGO -- survived? Can we learn anything from WABC's revival, at least in the 6+ shares? Are they all destined for the same fate or is there something they do that keeps them going? Does it depend on the market? The competition? Would FM make a difference? Do politics play a part? Was KGO an aberration or yet another canary in the coal mine?

You could also ask if it even matters. Things change, people's tastes change, nothing lasts forever. People listen to a lot of talk radio, but not always TO talk radio. Many listen to public radio -- people in the Bay Area looking for talk content that's not hard-core conservative have KQED, which also happens to be one of the highest-rated stations in the market, and KALW, too. (And Pacifica, but that's a whole other story.) Younger listeners favor podcasts for their talk content. A lot of businesses have life cycles; once-popular retailers and restaurants and brands come and go. Been to a shopping mall lately? Then you know.

And I wonder if the feelings about KGO are exacerbated by the new format. Sports betting talk hasn't set the ratings on fire anywhere, and there's no reason to think that it will be a ratings success on KGO. But that's not how success will ultimately be measured for that format. Assuming that taking BetQL and other syndicated programming will cost nothing and other expenses will be minimal, just getting on national sports book buys (despite sports gambling not being legal yet in California) and combo buys with KNBR and KTCT may generate enough revenue to make the format worth keeping.

Or not. And, surely, it's a shame that KGO is no longer what KGO once was, but it hasn't been that for a long time. Neither are KSTP, WWDB, WNWS, and other stations that had their days as unique talk stations. Others are hanging on by a thread. And still others are doing okay. Meanwhile, WABC is openly appealing to, and reaching, the older audience that's available on AM, gambling that concentrating on local sales will fill the inventory in which big agencies aren't interested.

Which brings us back to the original question. What would you do with a KGO? What would you do with an AM station in an FM world? Correction: What would you do with an AM station in a digital, streaming, podcasting, social media world? Broker it out? Foreign language programming? (Side note: Please stop saying that programming in other languages "wastes" a frequency. It's serving an audience. Same for religion or any other specialty programming; not every station needs to be targeted towards you.) Music? (No. Not in 2022.) If you were Cumulus, what would you have done?

For that matter, what would you do with a struggling FM these days -- is iHeart's action in Dallas to dump the Eagle in favor of sports and guy talk a progressive move or a return to the mid-'90s, when guy talk seemed to be the future? Should every station be a sports station? (Yes! Ha ha ha,... YES!) Or should FM stations begin to try and reach the vast audience that traditional political talk has never reached, like younger women?

I don't know. I don't know if KGO was fixable at any stage, at least at 810 AM, at least in any way that might have lasted. I don't know if anything would have ultimately changed had the many missteps along the way been avoided. But it's an interesting exercise to think about what you'd do with a big-signal heritage station that lost its way.

You never know. You might come up with the Next Big Thing. Hey, vinyl came back. Maybe AM is vinyl. More likely it's 8-track, but stranger things have happened.

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After a week off, All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page came roaring back this week with new material for your radio show or podcast. Next week might be dicey, since I'll be... well, see below, but for now, there's lots to find at Talk Topics by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Oh, right, next week. I'll be at the NAB Show covering that convention and you'll see the results at All Access' Net News and on Twitter. Not sure if I'll have the time or remaining brain cells to write a column that Friday. We'll see. In the meantime, go Phils, go Birds, go Sixers.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon