When I awoke this morning it was from an intense dream, one in which I was determined to get back on radio, specifically on KABC in Los Angeles.
Unlike the fortress where KABC is located, its location in the dream was much more accessible to the public and I wanted very strongly to speak with the management.
Much of their programming seemed inane to me, and I listened to one young on air host as he had some sort of gossipy show which had some appeal to young women who called out to him from across the street from the station.
At one point he came out to greet them but as he saw me, he didn't seem proud of his show. And as a station KABC's ratings were low.
The KABC receptionist was Ganeisha, a warm and smart middle aged black woman and she and I hit it off immediately. She tried to persuade the management to meet with me but none would.
After she got off work, I managed to get into their facility and tried directly to meet with the General Manager, who I was told was Arthur Hamilton.
But I had a change of heart and decided instead to write a personal note and give it to Ganeisha the next day to request a meeting.
In order to capture the proper spelling of his name and his exact title, I had borrowed a pen that looked like a large burgundy pencil from a 60 ish woman sitting on a bench outside the facility.
The staff told me they thought there would be little interest on his part even though I had at one time had a popular show there, but go ahead and try.
I referenced George Green, the long time General Manager when I was on the air there and they thought that might help.
But I was frustrated because it seemed that no matter what I did, and however bad the station's ratings were, they would stick to a losing format and I would have no opportunity to offer the caliber of quality programming that would entertain and benefit listeners.
I awoke frustrated and had to calm myself.
Consciously I believe the future of what I publish is meant for the Internet and I'm pleased with that, but I was surprised at my strong subconscious desire expressed in a dream to return to radio.
Dick
9/14/13 With my friend Nelson Davis who deeply desires to have a radio show we immediately explored the possibility of a radio show with what for me were mind-numbing results. KABC had gone from a highly rated station with approximately a 5% share of the market when I was on the air in the 1990's to less than a 1% percent share today ranking at about No. 40.
Over the years this station had been so grossly mismanaged, that with so low a rating, it will have huge difficulty attracting significant ad dollars and is almost surely shunned by major media buyers which account for most ad sales.
None the less, a media time broker proposed to Nelson that we buy an hour of weekend time for $4,000 an hour, with the station also retaining 12 minutes of advertising. It was a ludicrous proposal for a station that had sunk to a level so low, that many an owner would "blow it up" and start anew with a new format.
My heart ached for all the people who had surely lost their jobs as the station could no longer afford them, and I was saddened also to think of what a great station it had once been and all the great talent that used to work there. In my mind I could still picture them and could hear their voices echo from the past.
But in today's world, there is the social media that attracts vast numbers of people from all over the world and this is the most common way people express themselves, rather than in the 1990's when they used talk radio and newspaper editorial pages. They also have YouTube, Twitter, Google, Skype and an incredible number of websites and blogs to visit.
And if that competition isn't enough, there is Sirius Satellite Radio, a subscription service without commercials which draws millions more people away from local broadcast radio.
From an advertiser perspective, if a broadcast radio station doesn't rank near the top of its market and with well-defined demographics, Google advertising with its precise targets and measurements can be a highly effective way of reaching a particular audience. And today, satellite and cable TV draws huge numbers of visitors as well, as does HBO, a subscription TV service without commercials.
Plus Netflix, "On-Demand" services and other broadcast services siphon off listeners.
And media today is even more strongly driven by "content" than in the past. A top on-air personality can setup his or her own website allowing listeners to download their broadcasts at times convenient to the listeners. So increasingly listeners will go directly to those websites and bypass radio stations.
That's not to say that local broadcast radio won't have a role in commute times but increasingly in competition with all these others outlets and those that now allow people to draw content also from their iPhones and new devices, including traffic reports, broadcast radio will find its role shrinking.
No, this is a far different media world than the one that existed in the 1990's and technology marches on at a rapid pace. And those broadcast radio stations such as KABC that are not well managed get left in the dust.
Dick
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