Let’s talk about talk radio.

I spent nearly all of my 15 years in radio working in news or talk.  That includes my two years with Maxwell at The Loop.  Before arriving in Chicago, Max had been a successful afternoon talk show host at WMMS in Cleveland.  We tried to replicate the formula at WLUP.  I’m a talk radio guy first and foremost, and I have few ideas about the format.

The trials and tribulations of talk radio have been the subject of much debate in radio industry trade publications.  Since news/talk hosts tend to view the world through the lens of political conservatism, discussions of talk radio as a format devolve into a slap fight over the politics of the hosts.

News/talk radio is at a crossroads.  Formerly dominant stations are now languishing at the bottom the ratings.  Sure – there are some stations that are still doing well, like KFI in Los Angeles, WGN in Chicago, WTMJ in Milwaukee, KMOX in St. Louis, WSB in Atlanta, and WLW in Cincinnati.  But some of the former giants of the industry, WABC and WOR in New York, WLS in Chicago, WBAP in Dallas, KABC in Los Angeles, and WFLA in Tampa are nowhere near what they were in 2005.

There are a number of reasons as to why this happened, and let’s run them down one by one.  The first problem is technological.  The news/talk giants are on AM, and the audience that is aware of AM radio is starting to disappear.  The FM radio audience lapped the AM radio audience in 1977.  38 years ago.  Now, think about how many people have died since then.  After that, think about the number of people who have been born since then who aren’t even aware of AM’s existence.  A number of formerly successful AM news/talk stations were powerhouses of music radio in a previous life.  Rush Limbaugh made hundreds of millions of dollars appealing to baby boomers who grew up listening to rock n’ roll on stations like WLS and WABC.

The listener who drove the news/talk renaissance in the 1990’s was probably born in the 1950’s, grew up listening to Dan Ingram or Larry Lujack, and returned to Rush Limbaugh, Don Wade, and Bob Grant as soon as contemporary music ceased to be interesting.  I was an intern at WLS in 1999.  The news/talk format was peppered with jingles and references to the years 1960-1985, when WLS was one of the most influential Top 40 music stations in the midwest.   The message was subtle: “you grew up with us….welcome back.”

Now those listeners are either aging out of advertiser-friendly demographics or aging out of life itself.  No one is available to replace them because potential news/talk listeners can’t make the cultural connection with a WLS or WABC, nor are they aware of AM’s existence.

I was born in 1980.  WLS switched to talk in 1989, just as I was about to enter fourth grade.  As I told Fred Winston, I had vague memories of listening to him play the hits on ‘LS in the 80’s.  But then again, I’m a radio geek, not a typical radio listener.

The solution is simple, right?  Take an existing news/talk station and drop it on FM. Problem solved.  Not exactly.  “Traditional” news/talk formats that have migrated to FM have run into the same speed bumps.

Which brings us to the next issue:  syndication.  Former WLW/Cincinnati and Clear Channel corporate program director Darryl Parks has done a great job detailing some of the problems with the news/talk format.  Among them, stations are now crippled by an onerous contract to carry Rush Limbaugh’s show.  Parks explains the situation at now-former affiliate WRKO/Boston:

Boston’s WRKO-AM is paying around $500,000 each year in rights fees.  They also provide approximately 3900 barter commercial minutes annually, which if valued at just $150 per :60 seconds is another $585,000 in cash they’re giving up.  And there’s the Rush Limbaugh Morning Update, which tacks on another 780 minutes annually for another $117,000 in commercial time.  All in Limbaugh’s show is costing WRKO-AM around $1.2 million dollars annually.  Now consider all those advertisers, nationally and locally in the Boston market, that have no placement demands because his show is considered “toxic” and you quickly discover the financial reason WRKO-AM is declaring, “No Mas!  No Mas!”

It should be noted that at one time, the contract to carry Rush’s program was a golden ticket in broadcasting.  He was that popular.  But now it is the equivalent of the backloaded baseball contract that’s handed to an aging slugger.  The amount of money going out the door far exceeds the value of the show to that station.

That’s another thing:  Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Levin, and other so-called “controversial” political talkers have been on “no buy” lists for years.  In the summer of ’99, long before anyone ever heard of Sandra Fluke, and during my internship at WLS, I would see faxes (yes, faxes) from various national advertisers saying their spots shouldn’t run during Limbaugh, Imus, Stern, etc.

Hundreds of news/talk stations that do carry the full slate of nationally syndicated talkers start the year hundreds of thousands of dollars – or even millions of dollars – in the hole. Couple that with a limited number of advertisers…ownership is then forced to make cuts elsewhere.  Local programming, news, weekend hosts.  Weekends are loaded with audience-killing infomercials.  They pay the bills, but they also insure that the morning show starts at zero on Monday morning.  Syndicated programming robs their affiliate stations of the ability to be nimble – in both economics and content.

That’s the other problem with devoting a good chunk of your broadcast day to nationally syndicated programming:  content.  A good talk station – and good talk show hosts – place themselves inside the local conversation, whatever that may be.  If Chicago is talking about the Blackhawks, then people are going to seek out media outlets that are talking about the Blackhawks.  A nationally syndicated show that’s discussing the umpteenth Republican jumping into the 2016 presidential race is not going to resonate with an audience that is obsessed with something else.

The news/talk stations that have schedule comprised of local hosts have the ability to turn and react to whatever is happening in their city on a given day.  As a result, they tend to do very well – WTMJ, WGN, KFI, WLW, New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton, KMBZ-FM in Kansas City, KIRO-FM in Seattle and the like.

What’s the next step?   With very few exceptions (WMMS in Cleveland and WTKS-FM in Orlando), FM talk collapsed as soon as Howard Stern decamped for Sirius/XM in 2005.  Without Stern to anchor the broadcast day, the rest of the schedule went adrift.  FM talk shows ran into the same problem as their AM news/talk counterparts – not resonating with the audience.  On AM, talk show hosts get bogged down in political trivia.  FM talk shows tend to get mired in circular conversations and in-jokes among the cast.  It may be entertaining to radio nerds and a small cadre of superfans, but it’s incomprehensible to the public at large.  Does anyone want to listen to a 45 minute conversation about the traffic reporter’s shirt?  Howard Stern put in 14 hour days in order to sound loose and unprepared.  It sounded casual, but every segment had a purpose.  Many hosts who followed in his footsteps learned the wrong lessons.

Talk radio can make a ton of money.  Ratings are a simple formula:  total audience (“cume”) plus time spent listening (TSL).  WGN was able to roll up double digit shares in the 70’s and 80’s because over a million people listened to the station for hours each day.  If a talk station has a cumulative audience of 600,000 people per week, and they listen for an average of three hours per day, that talk station is going to generate ratings, and in turn, generate mountains of revenue for its owner.  Talk radio is a foreground format, so advertisers have a greater chance of their commercial actually being heard by the listener.

However, talk radio stations require an equally large mountain of money to get off the ground.  In 2011, I was part of an attempt to start an all-news station on FM.  The owners spent millions on people and equipment.  FM News 101.1 debuted with a .2 share of the audience, close to dead last.  It never got higher than a .5 before the plug was pulled in July of 2012.

Spoken word radio stations take time to build an audience.  And when I say “time,” I mean “years.”  The aforementioned WLS flipped to talk in August of 1989.  In 1992, ABC came very close to flipping the station to a satellite-fed country music format.  Local management was able to talk the network into a stay of execution, and WLS became a very successful talk station in 1993.  It took four years in the wilderness before finding the promised land.

Eventually, such a station will generate ratings and revenue to offset those startup costs. Such an owner needs to be like Ted Turner, that combination of rich and crazy that is willing to look past the poor ratings and negative press to see a concept through to success.

Talk radio is looking for a savior.  It’s available to anyone who’s willing to take it.