Clear Channel has far worse problems to worry about. They’re collapse would improve radio dramatically.
*A running thread in this column over the last few years has been the rise and gradual fall of traditional news-talk radio on the FM dial. This week’s big chapter comes from western PENNSYLVANIA, where Clear Channel’s WPGB (104.7) was an FM talk pioneer when it launched back in 2004. With Pittsburgh DJ-turned-talk host Jim Quinn in mornings, Rush Limbaugh in middays and, for five seasons, Pirates baseball in the evenings, “NewsTalk 104.7″ aimed to replicate many of the elements that had long made CBS Radio’s KDKA (1020) a Steel City success story.
For a time, it worked, but then a funny thing happened: even without Rush or the Bucs, KDKA’s relentless local focus overcame its AM dial position, while Clear Channel budget cuts began to erode whatever numbers WPGB had started to build up. The Pirates rights went back to CBS in 2012, landing on “Fan” KDKA-FM (93.7), and then last winter Clear Channel abruptly pulled the plug on the “Quinn and Rose” morning show, replacing it with a regional show based at WWVA (1170) over in Wheeling, West Virginia. At one point earlier this year, KDKA(AM) boasted nearly four times as many listeners as WPGB, leaving 104.7 as by far the lowest-rated full-market FM signal in the Pittsburgh market. So when rumors began to swirl this summer that WPGB was due for a format change, the only real surprise was that it had taken Clear Channel so long.
As our sister site RadioInsight first reported over the weekend, the next chapter for 104.7 appears to be country, though the flip may not occur until Labor Day weekend.
Country, of course, is another CBS Radio specialty in Pittsburgh; WDSY (107.9) is usually right at the top of the ratings, often in a neck-and-neck battle with Clear Channel’s flagship rocker, WDVE (102.5). That makes a 104.7 flip to country a perfectly typical page from today’s Clear Channel playbook: the new station won’t necessarily be designed to challenge Y108 for ratings dominance, just to shave enough of its ratings away to keep WDVE as a dominant first-place player. (Two more Clear Channel FMs, top-40 WKST-FM 96.1 and classic hits WWSW 94.5, are also near the top of the ratings alongside WDSY and WDVE; the fifth, modern rock WXDX-FM 105.9, is lower in the overall numbers but attracts a young male demographic that’s much more valuable than WPGB’s older talk audience.)
*Assuming a WPGB flip is really in the offing – and, again, there’s been no official announcement yet from Clear Channel and may not be one for a few weeks yet – there are plenty of questions to answer, both short-term and longer. For instance: where do the major syudicated pieces of the WPGB lineup land? Across the state in Philadelphia, CBS Radio’s WPHT (1210) was happy to reclaim Rush Limbaugh after Premiere moved him over to Merlin’s WWIQ (106.9), a much shorter-lived attempt at FM talk. Would Limbaugh’s former Pittsburgh home, KDKA, take him back? Right now, that noon-3 slot is home to KDKA veteran Mike Pintek, leading into the KDKA afternoon news block.
If KDKA doesn’t want Rush back after a decade’s absence, the options grow less impressive very quickly. If Premiere wants to clear more of the existing WPGB lineup, there’s Clear Channel’s lone AM in the market, WBGG (970 Pittsburgh), as a possible option to flip to talk with not only Rush but also Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Coast to Coast overnight. But that 5 kW facility is seriously signal-challenged, even with an impending FM translator on tap. (The translator would put the 970 programming on FM for the core of the market, but wouldn’t do much to fill 970′s significant nulls in the suburbs.) And WBGG already serves a useful purpose in the Clear Channel landscape. Even as a low-rated ESPN outlet, it reinforces the strong sports image that’s a secondary focus at its FM rock sisters, WDVE and WXDX, which hold the broadcast rights to the Steelers and Penguins, respectively.
Other options for Premiere become even bleaker: Birach’s WWCS (540 Canonsburg) picked up Fox Sports when 970 went to ESPN. Disney’s WDDZ (1250 Pittsburgh) has one of the better AM signals in town after KDKA, and it’s been quietly on the market for a few years now. Would Clear Channel, not generally a net buyer of stations right now, want to pick it up as a new WPGB AM outlet? And there’s WJAS (1320 Pittsburgh), another pretty good AM signal that just changed hands from Renda to Frank Iorio. Its standards audience is aging fast – could it be reborn as a talker?
Even if all of this turns out to be speculative, as indeed it may, it’s increasingly clear that stations like WPGB that try to plug into a national talk lineup with little or no local content don’t have much of a future on FM, or even AM. As we’ve explored previously in this column, Clear Channel failed with its attempt to launch a new talker in Boston (WXKS 1200) against established players, even with Rush on its lineup. In New York, Clear Channel’s reborn WOR (710) runs a nearly identical signal to WPGB and remains mired low in the ratings.
You don’t need us to point out the lack of vibrancy in the talk format these days, especially not when even some of the format’s creators, such as former Clear Channel talk honcho Darryl Parks, are doing so far more eloquently than we can. But it’s worth noting in this context that Premiere’s very fat contract with Limbaugh is nearing an end, and that’s the one event that could precipitate a huge change in the format’s direction. While Limbaugh’s overall numbers remain stronger than any of his talk competitors, the experience of stations such as WPGB, WXKS, WWIQ and WOR (not to mention KEIB, the Los Angeles AM where Clear Channel relocated Rush from giant KFI earlier this year) would seem to suggest that the Rush Limbaugh of the 2010s can’t single-handedly carry a station the way the Rush of the 1990s could. As we’ve noted elsewhere, there’s a solid argument to be made these days that heritage stations like WHAM in Rochester, WGY in Albany or WTIC in Hartford do well these days as much in spite of Rush as because of him. Why else, after all, would we see failure after failure from stations that carry Rush and Hannity but lack all the other elements – strong local news, local talk personalities, sports, etc. – that the heritage stations still use to succeed?
(Those are generally the exact elements that the ill-fated progressive talkers also lacked a few years ago, which raises the question of whether it was the politics or the overall programming elements that did those stations in. But we digress…)
*Back to Pittsburgh, then: if Clear Channel is indeed planning to drop a “104.7 the Bull” or a “B104.7″ into the market, it would be the third big country competitor in the region. In addition to CBS Radio’s big gun, WDSY, the new country outlet would have the potential to cut into the numbers at Keymarket’s “Froggy” trimulcast, WOGF (104.3 Moon Township), WOGI (94.9 Oliver) and WOGH (103.5 Burgettstown). It’s those signals, which primarily reach Pittsburgh’s southern and western suburbs, that would appear to have the most to lose from a second full-market country station in town.