Sunday, January 04, 2009

2009: SHOCKER in radio; another "forced" Witham vehicle buy......

I'm (finally) relaxing at big bro's house Saturday evening during NFL action, catching up on news from home, when I get to vartv.com and get the early candidate for "shock of the year".

Hoffman Communications has apparently laid off the entire staff of WGGM and WZEZ. I worked for Hoffman for nine years (1988-97), so this surprised me, but the second sentence floored me.

Apparently also exiting is long-time VP/GM Paul Scott. He was my boss there, and had been a fixture there for over 25 years.

The only conjecture I have as to why this has all happened is that Hoffman has a buyer and is getting out of radio. Back in the 80s and 90s, Hoffman owned WDYL here in town as well as WGGM, plus stations in Baton Rouge and near Atlanta and almost acquired one in Norfolk.

As the 90s progressed, the company shrunk, selling off the Georgia, then the Louisiana station, before selling WDYL in 1999. WZEZ was a new sign-on in 2001, a station won via FCC auction. Its signal has never been good enough to attract a large Richmond audience, and thus, firm placement in ad buys unfortunately.

My prayers are with my friends in Chester. This was not the way I wanted to see 2009 begin.

And we haven't even touched the 900-pound gorilla in the radio room known as Clear Channel. All CC GMs are headed to Texas for a "budget meeting" this week, and I am expecting to start reading about tons and tons of "layoffs due to budget cuts" at about anytime, as the new privately owned CC gets ready to swallow tough, and very high, debt payments.

Don't be surprised when, one day, one person will be the program director for every Clear Channel-owned station in America that shares the same format; say, country, for example. Rather than having a person in-house in each city programming the station to fit the taste, culture and styles unique to that city, one human will cookie-cutter the country format from some "format lab" and they'll magically determine what country listeners want to hear in Birmingham, Boise, Bismarck, Boston, and Baton Rouge, and pipe it nationwide.

Scary, isn't it? Radio's BIGGEST advantage is being sacrificed at the altar of high debt payments. LOCALISM. Why pay the money to have locals when one guy or lady can decide what songs to air on your favorite station from the CC corporate offices in San Antonio, and thus, cause 75 program directors across the nation to lose their jobs? That'll save some money!

At the costly expense of radio continuing to lose touch with its listeners.

BEFORE television, the "network" model (CBS, NBC, et al) was the way of radio. You listened to your favorite network shows on your favorite station, and they offered local programming when the network wasn't on (sound familiar??).

In the case of the behemoth companies like Clear Channel, this is where they're going (Ryan Seacrest, come on down!), and it's not just them.

Radio's best hope? That the big companies, in order to survive, have to sell lots of stations and a new generation of owners that understand RADIO will be able to independently own, or build companies that will re-introduce localism to radio.

We'll see what happens, but I'm not looking forward to reading the radio web publications for the next few weeks.

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I'll save the vehicle story for another post. Suffice it to say, the Withams never get the chance to sit down, decide when they'd like to buy a "new to them" car (we don't buy new cars anymore), then start shopping, dickering, etc.

We always have a car self-destruct, forcing upon us a car buying experience within 24 hours or so. Such was the case in North Carolina during our New Years getaway.

We left for Carolina in a Ford, and returned in a Hyundai.

Even though I hate the car payment, the preceding sentence does promote the fact that we've upgraded. :)

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