Below The Beltway

I missed this last weekend, but former WMAL radio host Chris Core, whose 9am to 11:45am slot of sanity in an otherwise insane universe has been taken over by someone who obviously wants to be the next Limbaugh/Hannity/Levin, had a column in the WaPo on what really happened at WMAL on the last day of February:

Chris Berry, the general manager, told me that the parent company of WMAL, Citadel Broadcasting, had ordered nationwide cutbacks. Five people at WMAL, including the news director, the national sales manager and me, had to be terminated immediately, as did the entire on-air staff of our sister station WJZW. I was shocked at the suddenness with which this happened. But I wasn’t totally surprised. I’d kind of seen it coming.

The business model for radio, like all other media today, has changed and become more competitive over the years. Just as cable diluted the television market, the rise of FM and eventually satellite radio has increased listeners’ choices. Add the Internet to the mix, and radio stations have to either evolve from their traditional ways or wither. WMAL made some costly choices over the years.

But, as Core notes, the seeds for what happened to WMAL, and what is basically the death of local AM radion in Washington were laid almost 30 years ago:

When I joined it in February 1975, it was a full-service station at its peak. The show I first worked on as a news and sports reporter, “Harden and Weaver,” had a 25 share, meaning that one-fourth of the D.C. area population listened to it. Thirty-three years later, the WMAL morning show, the terrific “Grandy and Andy,” is attracting a 3.6 share and the top-rated station a 9.1. To be fair, there are now many more stations on the air for listeners to choose from. Double-digit shares are a thing of the past. Still, for the three decades I was at WMAL, I saw a steady decline in audience.

(…)

WMAL was already in trouble in 1980, but it didn’t know it yet. It plugged along on its formula of homegrown personalities and being all things to all people, but all people weren’t listening to a single station anymore. Seeing its declining market share, WMAL added radio’s hottest property, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, to its lineup in the late 1980s. The result was twofold: Limbaugh eventually wound up with the highest ratings on the station (still true today) and his show labeled WMAL a right-wing radio station instead of an objective source for news and information.

People often lamented to me in later years, “Why can’t WMAL be like it was in the old days?” It’s because radio is a business. And businesses that stay static and ignore market conditions shrivel and die. The shoe store, the restaurant and the automobile business all follow different business models from the ones of 30 years ago, or they’d be long since gone. Same thing with radio.

When I moved to Northern Virginia in 1990, things still hadn’t changed that much. Harden & Weaver were still on the air, Chris Core was partnered with Bill Trumbull in the afternoons. There was even a competing local-talk station at 980 on the dial with a slate of interesting hosts such as Mark Davis. Slowly but surely, though, that station died and WMAL changed to become what it is today.

There’s really no use mourning for those days, because they’re never coming back, just like Studebakers, vinyl records, malt shops, and Polaroid cameras aren’t coming back. If enough people still wanted them and were willing to pay for them, then maybe they’d survive, but that demand doesn’t exist and things change.

As Core notes, that’s what capitalism is all about:

I’m just a small example of what’s happening to people all over the country as our economy changes. Good companies that think beyond today’s bottom line and plan for the future will survive. The cut-costs-at-all costs companies will not. The free market works. But smart capitalism is a Core value.

If only our political leaders understood this.

I still can’t believe they let this guy go.