Killing the (all-)news
On news radio, the crushing burden of debt, and the washing away of another trusted voice
Audacy, the large radio operator that owns the license to broadcast WCBS on 880 AM in New York City, has announced the end of the station as it has been known for almost 60 years. The landmark all-news format and the network-flagship call letters are both to be retired as the signal is turned over to an all-sports format.
■ Many, if not most, of the extremely large radio station operators have been ruthless in their approach to the medium over the quarter-century since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ripped the lid off of old limits on the number of stations any single operator could license. The biggest players engaged in the equivalent of a land rush, often paying irrational, debt-fueled prices to get big before their rivals could.
■ How irrational were those prices? Consider that the largest operator in the country has run at an operating loss of $944 million so far this year on revenues of $1.7 billion -- and that's before coughing up $191 million in interest payments. Interest costs have dwarfed any operating profits for at least three years straight. Audacy, which comes in second by revenues, has had such a bad run that it "reorganized" out of Chapter 11 earlier this year.
■ The fundamental problem is the debt burden, which in turn has caused managers (and owners) to treat radio stations like an extractive industry -- like mines to be stripped -- rather than as renewable, sustainable operations -- like farms to be tended. To be sure, technology has ushered in radical changes in audience listening patterns, but enlightened management could have leveraged heritage station identities (like WCBS) to capitalize on those changes, rather than torching the storied names and leaving hard-working people unemployed.
■ Choices were made that got us here. And "here", far more than it should be, is a place where a public in dire need of dependable and trustworthy sources of news and information no longer know which outlets to trust, because so many of the names they used to know have been cast off like garbage.
