Thursday, January 30, 2020

San Diego Radio: Tough Times For Local Radio

Anyone Here?
The San Diego dial has gone through a stunning shakeup in the past week. Some of the top voices on the local airwaves have lost their jobs.

“Unprecedented and unpredictable but at the same time, not surprising” because of the changes the industry is going through, Jon Sinton told the San Diego Union-Tribune. The veteran radio owner, operator and consultant talked of the shakeups initiated by three different radio ownership groups:
  • Tegna Inc., owner of KFMB AM 760 and 100.7 FM, has given two weeks’ notice to on-air personalities Chris Cantore, Cha Cha Harlow, Meryl Klemow, Robin Roth, Rick Lawrence, Brent Winterble, Mike Slater and Mark Larson.
  • iHeartMedia, the national company that owns seven local stations, let go of long-time disc jockey Coe Lewis, Nina “Ruth 66" Reeba and Jim McInnes of KGB Radio, Chris Merrill of talk radio station KOGO, Chris “Qui West” of Jam’n 95.7 and Steve Kramer of Channel 93.3.
  • Pennsylvania-based Entercom, which owns four San Diego-area stations, fired A.J. Machado and Sara Perry, co-hosts of the popular A.J. and Sara Morning Show on adult contemporary station Sunny 98.1 on Jan. 22. Dana DiDonato and Jayson Prim of the morning show on Alt 94.9 also lost their gigs.
According to the San Diego Reader, about 45 employees at KFMB were called to a meeting last Friday and told the moves were due to Tegna’s sale of its San Diego stations to Local Media San Diego, also known as LMSD. About five employees will be retained by LMSD. A staffer confirmed the account to the Union-Tribune, saying the employees at the meeting included sales and promotional staffers as well as on-air workers.

Tegna, based in the Washington D.C. area, has a broadcast division primarily known for its ownership of television rather than radio stations. The company last fall bought 11 TV outlets for $740 milion in cash, upping its fleet to 62 stations across the country. In December 2018, Tegna bought KFMB-TV CBS 8 and CW Channel 6 for $325 million in cash.

A number of on-air personalities were reluctant to talk on the record to the Union-Tribune, citing concerns about future job prospects, but some have taken to social media.

Machado, who spent two years at Sunny 98.1, said on Facebook, “Well, radio is a savage business and today it was my turn.”

“I’m not sure what the future holds,” Machado said in his post. “I may end up back on San Diego’s airwaves, I may end up in another city or I may just move onto something else and finally start getting some sleep.”

Like so many other media industries in recent years, the radio business is going through fundamental economic shifts, especially on the local level.

“Radio is in chaos,” said Dean Nelson, journalism program director at Point Loma Nazarene University. “There are so many other ways to connect with personalities and voices.”

Satellite radio such as Sirius XM, podcasts, streaming services like Pandora and Internet options like Amazon Music and Apple Music have eaten into traditional radio’s core audience. All that came on the heels of an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions of local stations by larger radio groups starting in the 1990s.

“Consolidation has been going on for decades now,” Nelson said. The spate of cuts in San Diego “is not a new thing, it just happens to be the same thing only at a really big scale.”

“What’s lost is the local voices — the way the community talks to itself and hears from its own residents about what’s going on,” said Nelson, who has followed San Diego media since 1984. “There’s a lot lost when local voices, local news, local personalities, are not the ones we’re listening to. Then it becomes kind of corporatized and homogenized.”

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