July 7, 2011
by Ed Ryan
Dateline Chicago. Will Randy Michaels Flip The Loop or The Q to News? Will he flip one to some sort of spoken word format? Or does he have plan C in mind and he?s happy to allow us all to speculate and write about him until the decision is made. What role does Steve Dahl play on Randy?s team, if any, now that his contract to sit on the sidelines is set to expire? Dahl wasn?t exactly killing it in the ratings with CBS when he was let go and the success of the Disco Demolition Promotion was a lifetime ago (1979). Can another news station be built in Chicago from the ground up and can it compete and win against others already entrenched in the format? There really is only one man who can answer that question backed with the experience of running the number one revenue generating news machine in America.
Joel Oxley is the General Manager of WTOP, the most successful news station in America. In market number 9, WTOP generated an eye-popping $57 million in revenue in 2010, including $3 million on the digital side. With a home base in the nation?s capital, Oxley and his band of off-line and online reporters have a lot to talk about, much more than what Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are doing to spend us into bankruptcy. ?One of the main things we have going for us is we have really bad traffic here. We also have volatile weather, which people are always trying to keep up with. Both of those bring a lot of people to the station. Certainly, there is a lot of news around Washington, but a lot of what we do is local and human interest and water cooler.?
If someone were considering a flip to news, Oxley has some interesting advice. ?For one thing, I would say you would be a lot better off on the FM dial. As you know, I am a proponent of that. Certainly what we saw, is that it?s younger, and also, we get more women by being on the FM dial. An awful lot of our business is going in that direction. You have to have your distribution in place. If you don?t have the right distribution, you are not going to be successful. A lot of people seem to forget about that.?
Piece of advice number two. Make sure people really care about what you cover. ?I think it (a flip to news) can succeed if done the right way. I think certain markets are going to work better than others. I think most of the people in the country want to be engaged and I do think there is a business there. I also think that there are more resources to go get news than ever. To put it in a broadcast form, I think can be done. You have to be careful going to all the town hall meetings or county meetings. While there is a place for those, they still have to be generating news that?s intersecting enough for people to want to listen to. You?ve really got to do stuff that people care about. We try to make it so it touches as many people as possible.
?Look at what TRN (Talk Radio Network) is doing. They supply a backbone that is possible for stations to do all news. There are still great products coming out on CBS and CNN and others to use at the top of the hour. I also look at what KGO did, and has done so brilliantly over the years, and what we do, and it?s very different. It?s different between doing a all-talk and all-news. You have got to have a really big market, going back to my comment about traffic, to really be able to do all-news all of the time.?
It?s no secret that the news format is the most expensive format to run and maintain. That does not include the initial start-up cost to flip and market as Oxley points out. ?There?s your launch cost, but then there?s also the cost that you have to have just to keep it going for a year. At launch you have to look at your shut down costs for whatever format they might flip from. They are going to be writing quite a few checks to get out of that with the people who are being let go. That?s certainly going to cost you a good bit of money. Could even be into 7 figures depending on what the contracts are like. If somebody has a two year deal that?s been a morning man for a while or an afternoon personality, you might be looking at paying out most of their contract. So that?s one consideration. Then to launch it properly, you have to do a decent PR effort, and or course, advertising is the big X factor. How much are you going to spend on marketing? If you want to make a good splash in Chicago and really launch something right I think you?d be looking at a couple of million dollars. Then you have incidental costs. I?ll just bring up mundane things like business cards. Doing all of that start up to kind of get your whole culture going, let alone all the people that you?re hiring. You are quickly into millions of dollars.?
And finally, Oxley says if you decide to go all news, keep it short and simple. ?There certainly is always an appetite, and NPR proves it all the time, for long form news. They do an amazing job with that and putting together long pieces. It?s almost an ADD world out there and an awful lot of people want it short and they want to hear it quickly . I think what people want with news, and it?s been our philosophy to find things that they are interested in. In a more general sense, people want to be on top of things. People don?t want to walk in the office or walk into a party or meeting a bunch of friends and not know the top things that are going on. That could be a lot of things. That could be what we?re doing in Afghanistan, or balancing the budget. That could also be the latest entertainment story or the top sports story or why the DOW is going down or up. There are so many different things that it could be. You have got to find the things that are really catching people?s attention. That?s actually where the internet is our friend. You get instant information on what a lot of top stories are. What are the stories people are clicking on, on your website the most? You should not just be doing that on your site, but also on-air. What are the stories that are getting the biggest reaction and emails and comments on-air?
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