Another Air America Affiliate Bites The Dust!!!

[RFKJrNews]

Here in the progressive, hip, liberal blue-city-in-a-red-state mecca of Austin, TX, another Air America affiliate has apparently bought the farm. KOKE-AM 1600 is no longer.

http://ltradio.blogspot.com/2007/10/adios-austin.html

Although media insiders knew this was coming, the average listener got got no warning at all. Perhaps because the station owner's didn't want another San Diego-style protest on their hands. They just did it quietly, in the middle of the night. no announcement.

I noticed late last night my local AAR affiliate KOKE had dead air for several hours. Just thought it was a transmitter problem, until I turned on the station at 5am when I woke up, only to hear Tejano/Mexican music instead of the "Young Turks."

First reaction was "WTF"? Then, it became clear this was a permanent format change. Why?

Well, let's examine the summer `07 Arbitron ratings for this market:

KOKE-AM 0.9 0.9 0.7 0.9

Yikes. Can't even pull 1% in Austin, TX? Amazing but true. don't ask me why. This is a city that is overwhelmingly Democratic, but the right-wing talk radio stations in town consistently get much better ratings.

Why they switched to the Mexican music format is a puzzle, too - because we already have about 5 or 6 spanish language stations in town. We have 3 right-wing talk stations.

Damn, damn, damn. Austin just lost it's ONLY liberal news/talk station.

Boy, am I pissed about this! ARGH!!!

[OrangeCountyDemocrat]

1. Buenos Dias

I wonder if you'll find anyone there that still speaks English. They probably fired all the staff, and replaced them with Spanish speaking folk.

[RFKJrNews]

2. Or Buenos Noches!

Adios Amigos, and Good Night!

A friend of mine worked in the newsroom at KOKE, and yep, you're right- everybody got their walking papers.

[LTR]

3. Most small AM stations have a hard time even getting a 1.0

Sports and foreign language often do much worse.

Progressive talk is a growth format. It involves dragging younger listeners to an obscure station on the AM band. And let's face it - younger listeners don't tune in to AM radio.

BTW: The format flip has nothing to do with ratings. The station, along with three others, was flipped and the new owner programs Spanish-language formats.

[RFKJrNews]

5. Do a comparison check amongst Austin radio stations

Check out the Arbitrons for KOKE (formerly Air America) vs. the sports, religious, Spanish language and right-wing talk stations in town, and you will see for yourself that AAR was consistently at the bottom of the heap.

I'm sure that had something to do with why the owners wanted to sell it off to Mr. Garcia. As someone who has worked in the Austin radio market for nearly 20 years, I can tell you that's how the cookie crumbles.

It's a matter of simple economics, really. No ratings = no advertisers. No advertisers = station sale or format change.

That's the biz, baby! Damned unfortunate, tho'.

[OnyxCollie]

9. What was their signal strength?

Did they have any promotions/billboards?

Before you can have ratings, the audience must be aware of the station & be able to listen to it.

The best PD, the best DJ, won't make a difference without meeting that criteria.

If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

[LTR]

11. Here's a comparison check

The most recent Arbitron ratings for the Austin market:

http://stationratings.com/ratings.asp?market=135

Notice that most of the top stations are on FM. That's typical in every market.

The top AM stations:

KLBJ - Top AM in the market (#5 overall) in most recent ratings period. 5.0 share of radio listeners. Heritage 50,000 watt station airing conservative talk. They've been doing it for a long time, and have been able to build up the format. Ironic that this station, for a long time owned by Lady Bird Johnson's family, is now doing conservotalk.

KVET - #2 AM, #19 overall. 1.5 share. Sports format, which has been on since the 90s.

KOKE - #3 AM, #20 overall. 0.9 share. 0.8 share. Liberal talk (until yesterday).

KJCE - #4 AM, #21 overall. Owned by Entercom, and conservotalk up the wazoo.

And the rest.

Keep in mind that this is for overall listenership. Advertiser and agencies usually don't buy based on these numbers. Unfortunately, Arbitron only releases daypart and demographic breakdowns to subscribers, so these numbers are often difficult to come by.

Needless to say, AM in general does rather poorly in this market. And I agree with you, that's the way of the world. I got the feeling when I heard about KOKE being sold a few weeks ago that a new format would be installed.

And this list proves my point that attracting new listeners to an AM station is a long, uphill road. It takes a lot of time, and progressive talk will struggle. Anyone who thinks this will happen overnight is delusional. It took nearly 20 years for sports to find a niche on the AM dial, and now, with its desirable narrow demographics, is finding itself all over the place.

[OnyxCollie]

4. Low ratings?

Let me see if I can guess why:

Weak signal.

No promotions/advertising budget.

No sponsors.

SOP for Cheap Channel when they want to dump a station.

[zbdent]

7. 1350AM in Akron

You're listing the exact circumstances here in Ohio ... (also, another Clear Channel station DJ claiming it was radio feeds from Cuba) ...

Replaced with the under-represented "Sports Talk" format :sarcasm: ...

[OnyxCollie]

8. Yes. I used to listen to WARF in Akron.

I also used to work for WENZ 107.9 FM in Cleveland. Cheap Channel did the same thing to that station.

What's the story about radio feeds from Cuba?!?

[zbdent]

12. WKDD a-hole Matt Patrick would claim (in the early days of lib radio)

that some signal was coming out of Cuba ...

Before I found out about 1350, I didn't know he was referring to it.

BTW, WKDD and 1350 broadcast all their Akron stations out of the same building ... in Canton. Similar with their "Cleveland" stations ... in Independence, just across the border from the city limits of Cleveland.

[zbdent]

6. "Bites the dust" or "taken into an alley and shot in the back of the head

in a gangland style massacre reminiscent of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre"?

[Javaman]

10. I switched on this morning and I was like, "what's this shit?"

several things as to why it didn't do better. Only in the past few months they finally started getting better advertising, but mostly, it was due to really bad, no awful reception, long periods of nothing followed by repetitious PSA's that drove me to drink, horrible program changes, even more horrible mid day DJ's, terrible top of the hour news updates that were either cut off midstream or starter music came on but no news.

The whole austin operation was a giant cluster fuck.

just one problem after another.

I listened for as long as they were on here despite the problems but honestly, I can't say I'm the least bit surprised.

Pod casting now for me, I guess.

[Strelnikov_]

17. And with all that they were still the #3 AM station n/t

[Javaman]

and yet they were still pulled. go figure. nt

[AuntPatsy]

13. I heard them talking about AA on faux this morning when talking about the Randy

thing, the female actually said to the effect that isn't AA off the air yet since they are not being paid by their bosses? Now what she meant by that I don't know, the husband always has it on early in the morning and thats what I woke up to...

All I can come up with is that there is an effort to destroy Liberal talk and everyone on Faux is aware of it....

[Freddie Stubbs]

14. Although Austin is very blue, the surrouding counties are red

[GCP]

15. Same exact thing happened in BOSTON - of all places

We lost our only AAR affiliate to some salsa-music station. :banghead:

[LeftCoast]

16. I thought I didn't like RW talk radio. Then I realized I just don't like talk radio.

I just can't stand the format. Loud talking head blathering on. Talking over callers. Telling everyone the proper way to think. Meh. Not for me.

[LTR]

20. I do see your point

Believe it or not, I often find myself tuning to music. Maybe I'm getting too old for all the screaming.

Then again, I remember the old days of Tom Snyder, Larry King and "Talknet." It was conversation, without endlessly shouting party talking points.

When I do listen, I prefer somewhat mellower and friendlier shows like Thom Hartmann's. I also like Ed Schultz, since he knows to get off politics once in a while, just to give listeners a little break. They know how to engage people.

Another one I just discovered this week is Nicole Sandler, who does the morning show on WINZ in Miami. Very laid back, friendly and engaging. No shouting.

[iamthebandfanman]

18. its called

bein shitty business people...


a problem that has plagued air america since its inception...

[RFKJrNews]

19. Why KOKE failed

Excellent point made above about how difficult it is to get younger listeners to try the AM side of the dial. It does take a little convincing, mostly due to AM's comparatively poor sound quality. Growing up in the digital age tends to make one rather particular about audio.

Another major factor in the sad KOKE saga is that the station totally lacked local programming. No local live call-in shows. No news staff. No involvement in the local community. The entirety of their programming was Air America, along with a few football games and weekend shows beamed in from the Dallas market.

Austinites don't give a damn what's going on in Dallas, but they DO care passionately about local issues. And they had no outlet for interaction on the Austin airwaves, especially considering that KLBJ-AM is rather infamous for screening out callers who disagree with their conservative viewpoint.

KLBJ, to their credit, knows how to do news-talk successfully from a business standpoint. They have a newsroom staff of 7-10 people, several local call-in shows, advertising, billboards, promotions, and stay completely engaged in the community. It doesn't hurt that they are a heritage station with those legendary call letters.

Always thought it fascinating that our right-wing news talk station in town was KLBJ, owned for 40 years by the family of one of our nation's most Democratic presidents. Oh, the irony!

Somehow, I don't think it's quite what Lyndon and Lady Bird had in mind.

[persiancowboy]

21. A sad day for Austin

I had the same issue. First I thought they have added a Spanish program to the station. After noticing that there is Spanish language programming 24 hours a day I knew that the station has been sold out. 1600 am was the only station I listened to other than KUT 90.5 FM and KOOP 96.1 FM.

I think the only Air America station left in Texas is in Corpus Christi. Air America closed its station in Fort-Worth Dallas area last year. They also had one in San Antonio that they closed after a few months.

I really liked the 1600 AM. I had noticed recently that they have much more ads rather than PSA's and they had improved the quality. I wish this Garcia guy would at least syndicate some of the popular shows. But considering the fact that it is going to be spanish programming station, he will probably not do it.

He owns many radio stations in Austin area. If I knew earlier about this we could have started a campaign to save the Air America station in Austin. But its too late. At least thats good that 1600 AM didn't join the list of other conservative talk stations in Austin.