Philly Radio: Andy Bloom Says If Radio Dies, It's By Suicide

A week before Christmas, Andy Bloom was laid off from his job as operations manager for Sportsradio WIP 94.1 FM  and Talk WPHT 1210 AM.  The company said it was part of plans to streamline operations.

Andy Bloom

Bloom is best known as the young program director at rock station 94.1 WYSP – WIP’s predecessor – who played a key role in the decision to simulcast Howard Stern’s New York morning program in Philadelphia and then Los Angeles in the 1980s. He returned to radio in 2007 at WIP and WPHT after four years as communications director for U.S. Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio).

Jeff Blumenthal, a reporter for the Philadelphia Business Journal, recently talked with Bloom about threats to the future of radio.

How has the business and format of sports talk radio changed over the years?

I think it was [former WIP program director] Tom Bigby who came up with the idea to mix sports talk with guy talk. It’s essentially moving in and out of sports and pop culture. But it all depends on how successful the teams are here. And I think that’s when things started to change for us.

When I started in 2007, the Phillies were making their big run, the Flyers were building toward a Stanley Cup Finals run in 2010 and the Eagles were a playoff team almost every year. There was only one parade out of that era but there was a lot of success and so everyone liked talking sports.

But by 2012 or 2013, the teams had all become so bad that it got depressing and ratings started to dip.
But the two guys who did not see a dip were Angelo [Cataldi] and Mike Missanelli. And that’s because they didn’t just talk sports; they also entertained. When the teams are not performing, you have to do more entertaining on the air.

Are podcasting and satellite radio existential threats to terrestrial talk radio, like the stations you ran at WPHT and WIP?

There are all sorts of alternatives now. It doesn’t mean that radio is dead. If radio dies, it will be because of suicide. It has to respond by being platform agnostic and trying to deliver the product in the way people are using it. On-demand is a way of life for TV. The measurement of how much programming is being DVR’d is a big issue for TV right now. They want total viewership to include DVR and there will be the same issue with radio and streaming. I think eventually they will be counted together.

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