Philly Radio: Ratings Skid For All-News KYW

When the latest quarterly radio ratings for the Philadelphia market were released this week, one station's numbers really jumped off the page, according to David Hiltbrand at philly.com.

And right through the floor.

KYW 1060 AM Newsradio had its 6+ share of listeners drop by a dismaying 54 percent over three months from February through April, a period that was relatively stable for its competitors, according to figures from the rating service Nielsen Audio.

The obvious explanation would be vernal. As Philadelphians go from February to April, and the likelihood of school closings and transit delays fades, listening to the all-news station becomes less essential.

But, writes Hiltbrand,  this decline is too steep to be purely seasonal.

"It's traditional to see some melt - no pun intended - between winter and spring numbers for KYW," says Dave Allan, chairman of the marketing department at St. Joseph's University. "But this is bigger than most."

Radio industry analyst Jerry Del Colliano also sees the problem as meteorological. But only to a degree.

Jerry Del Colliano

"KYW ratings are off because the snow stopped falling," he says. "Since then, there hasn't been a national or a local story Philadelphians care about. But [the numbers] haven't gotten this low in my memory."

The AM warhorse could be a victim of generational and technological factors.

"KYW suffers from an old, stale format," says Christopher Harper, a journalism professor at Temple University. "People can get their news and information from other sources."

Even the station's primary selling points, like "traffic on the twos," seem to belong to a different era.

Perhaps you're tuning in just for the reassurance of the familiar. "KYW is a habit," says Allan. "We know the Schuylkill [Expressway] will be backed up at the Conshohocken curve. We still want to hear them say it."

But it's a dying habit, according Hiltbrand.

"Find me someone under 40 who listens to radio," says Del Colliano. "Radio is on the decline, especially with millennials, and there are 95 million of them coming on. They listen to Spotify or Pandora or Beats."

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