Bonneville About To Pull The Plug On WaPo Radio?

[xoom44]

From today's Washingtonian.com...

... Word around the Post newsroom is that listener ratings are so low that the newspaper will close down its radio operation this fall at the end of the Washington Nationals baseball season.

Post Watch could not confirm the rumors.

"No hard decisions have been made yet," says Jim Farley, head of news and programming for Washington Post Radio and sibling station WTOP. Both are owned by Bonneville International, which is calling for a new format. The two parties are talking and looking to making changes to boost ratings momentum and therefore revenues.

Translation: Post Radio is hemorrhaging money; Bonneville has to stop the bleeding or kill the experiment with the Post.
. . .
Bonneville hoped that Post reporters could provide scintillating radio commentary, which is why the radio company decided to pay the Post to provide content. But most Post reporters couldn't perform. They might be good reporters, but many lack the gift of gab. In other words, they can be boring.

The few who can tell good radio stories are all over NPR and MSNBC, so Post Radio doesn't seem special.

Chalk up the failure to bad management. Post editors declined to train reporters and were miserly in paying them . . .
Bonneville has been forced to cut staff. Talent is moving on. Sam Litzinger, a radio pro who hosted the Post's midday program, left for CBS radio.

Wow - that didn't take long.

[JamesAnderson]

This is one of a string of very bad moves Bonneville has made in Washington DC.

First they alienated the audience by torching WGMS to put WTOP (in mono) on a strong signal. That did do some good, but the audience knew about the heritage of WGMS even if they didn't give a flip about the classical format, this was too significant of a station for them to mess with, and the fact that while they owned it as a classical station, they had the number 2 book in the Winter 2005 P2 book there.

They moved it to two weaker rimshotters, promptly losing a point, then threw the match.

WETA, which had lost significant ratings and revenue from listener donations being a public radio, an NCE-FM, snapped up the format, putting the classical format on the stronger signal.

WGMS went through two more callsign changes and are doing under a 2 in the book now as a 'Jack' clone, and that continues to stay around that. That's less than half the ratings the station had as a classical formatted station.

WTOP went to number 2 in the market, but that is like here, an AM/FM simulcast, so that does little good like it does here to say that you have that on an AM/FM when the average joe can't ever see the split numbers so the whole truth never gets told.

WFED 'Federal News Radio' does not do alot in the book either, and to add to the irony, you know where you heard the 'WTWP' first? Peter Schikele, via his PDQ Bach albums, he did one spoofing classical radio, and the calls stood for 'Wall-to-wall Pachelbel'. Pachelbel is widely known for only one work, the equivalent of today's 'one-hit wonder'. with that work being his 'Canon in D', although he did a substantial amount of music that is top-notch in the classical repertoire, from the baroque period.

[x]

Side note.

I thought it was in this forum that I saw the Pachelbel Rant. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM&v3

Can't find a post about it though.