Column: An abrupt format change at a beloved Bay Area station shows what’s wrong with the radio business

Listeners of San Francisco’s KGO radio station woke as much as a shock Monday.

The long-lasting AM station’s all-talk format was gone, supplanted by a sports activities playing format and a branding change to “The Unfold,” with the slogan, “The Bay’s Finest Guess on Sports activities.”

Listeners had nowhere to go to specific their dismay in public besides the station’s Fb web page. “Company greed at its most interesting,” wrote one listener. “There isn’t a sense of neighborhood anymore.”

The station’s hosts, their voices all of a sudden minimize off, fielded questions and feedback from their viewers members via personal emails and tweets. “Simply an avalanche of Fb responses,” says Mark Thompson, who held forth on KGO weekdays from 10 a.m. to midday. “There’s rage, incredulity and this deep emotion related to being disconnected from what was clearly a relationship that transcended data and information.”

Name it neighborhood. “Folks felt this immense connection,” Thompson instructed me. “‘You bought me via COVID,’ is what I’ve heard greater than something. ‘You have been my day by day connection.’ It’s heartbreaking.” (Disclosure: I used to be an everyday visitor on Thompson’s present.)

The sudden, disorienting change at KGO might look superficially like a neighborhood Bay Space story, but it surely displays two traits with nationwide implications. For one factor, it echoes the evolution of the radio enterprise from one reflecting native tastes and offering a communal supply of data and information right into a dispenser of homogenized, syndicated content material.

That evolution started with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated a cap of 20 AM and 20 FM stations that might be owned nationally by a single firm and doubled to eight the variety of stations a single proprietor might management within the largest metropolitan markets.

The regulation fostered a wave of mergers and acquisitions that produced immense nationwide networks; Atlanta-based Cumulus Media, the proprietor of KGO and the nation’s second-largest community, owns 406 stations nationally, together with six within the San Francisco market.

Cumulus didn’t reply to my requests for remark past referring me to a press launch it issued Monday, stating that KGO could be managed collectively with the corporate’s different sports activities stations within the Bay Space, KNBR and KTCT.

The assertion acknowledged KGO’s 80-year historical past at 810 on the AM dial however quoted the station’s basic supervisor, Larry Blumhagen, as saying, “Instances change, and we should change with them.”

Many of those acquisitions have been primarily based on overly optimistic expectations of the income to be made. That left the acquirers saddled with debt and subsequently inclined to chop prices. Native staffs have been minimize to the bone, and syndicated content material and infomercials started to fill the published day.

Cumulus filed for chapter safety in November 2017 and emerged in June 2018, having shed about $1 billion in debt within the course of.

The biggest radio community, IHeartMedia (previously Clear Channel) filed for chapter safety in March 2018 and accomplished its restructuring the next January, with its debt load minimize by virtually two-thirds.

Distant possession of its radio stations hasn’t served the Bay Space nicely over time. For years, Walt Disney Co. was an enormous participant in native media, due to its 1995 acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC. Along with KGO, its properties included KSFO-AM, a chat radio station whose lineup of far-right hosts — amongst them Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage — earned it the nickname “Sieg Heil in your dial.”

Below Cumulus, the lineup nonetheless consists of Hannity, together with right-wingers Dan Bongino, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and a day by day block of Fox Information broadcasting.

The second pattern is the enlargement of sports activities playing. As I reported earlier, sports activities playing has metastasized coast to coast; 36 states and the District of Columbia have legalized it in a single kind or one other since a 2018 Supreme Court docket determination that overturned a federal ban.

After shunning sports activities betting like poison, the professional sports activities leagues have gone all-in, fairly seemingly as a result of they see sports activities betting as a technique to hold younger males watching even out-of-market video games on TV.

The newest incarnations of the sports activities betting craze are Propositions 26 and 27 on November’s California poll, which might legalize sports activities betting within the state in barely other ways.

Hypothesis among the many KGO workers has been that the format change is a calculation by Cumulus — a raffle, because it have been — that one of many measures will move. If that’s so, it’s starting to seem like a nasty guess, since each are polling very poorly and are anticipated to go all the way down to defeat.

The format change isn’t the primary misstep dedicated by KGO’s homeowners. The station was ranked No. 1 by Arbitron within the Bay Space from mid-1978 via 2008, a interval wherein it was recognized for hosts such because the perennially fashionable Ronn Owens and Len Tillem, a lawyer whose blunt-talking strategy to authorized affairs prefigured the recognition of tv hosts equivalent to Judith “Choose Judy” Sheindlin.

In 2007, Disney spun off its radio holdings to Las Vegas-based Citadel Broadcasting, which in flip was acquired by Cumulus in 2011. “We went from having a price range to having much less of a price range to price reducing,” remembers John Daly, a longtime producer at KGO.

“Cumulus was notoriously low cost,” says Pat Thurston, a KGO host whose program adopted Thompson’s. Thurston and different workers members who participated in a Twitter group chat on Monday recalled their fruitless pleas for the corporate to spend money on advertising and construct up its promoting workers.

The schedule modified from native discuss 24/7 to infomercials on weekends. Thurston was instructed by an govt that the mum or dad thought-about infomercials a “money cow”; the supervisor instructed her that there was even some consideration given to creating KGO an all-infomercial, all-the-time station.

“We might make some huge cash doing infomercials,” he stated, “and it might be the best technique to do it.”

Quickly after taking on, Cumulus determined to alter KGO from all-talk to all-news, in a direct assault on the Bay Space’s current all-news station, KCBS. Cumulus spent lavishly to construct a newsroom, solely to find that “you couldn’t do information on a budget,” in Daly’s phrases, and that KCBS was a powerhouse impervious to competitors from a newcomer. Cumulus returned KGO to a chat format in 2016.

KCBS, which is owned by the Audacy radio conglomerate and remains to be all-news, is the No. 2-rated station available in the market, in keeping with Nielsen, behind solely the general public station KQED-FM. However KGO’s scores have been mired within the decrease depths, ranked twentieth general available in the market, although some hosts had greater scores.

The newest format change got here as a shock to the station’s hosts, engineers and different employees. They have been summoned to a workers assembly the morning of Oct. 5 and instructed solely that “KGO as we all know it is going to stop to exist,” Thurston remembers. They have been instructed that KGO had misplaced $20 million since its acquisition by Cumulus and that the format would change, however not what the brand new format could be.

Thompson was instructed to go on the air as ordinary at 10 a.m. Thursday, however ship the station’s ID at 10:15 a.m. and go away the sales space. He pleaded with station managers for permission to acknowledge that the format was altering and bid his listeners farewell, however that was refused.

“I stated, ‘Don’t you assume we owe the viewers an evidence of what’s occurring? There are lots of people who depend on the station.’ They stated, ‘Nope. That is the way in which we wish to do it.’”

The airwaves have been then taken over by a loop of money- and gambling-oriented music, together with Pink Floyd’s “Cash” and Woman Gaga’s “Poker Face” for 3 days, till the brand new format launched within the early morning hours Monday.

It’s correct to ask whether or not extra sports activities and extra playing content material is what the Bay Space is clamoring for, or whether or not Cumulus is aware of and even cares.

“We needed to provide folks vital breaking information, however with the wildfires up right here we tried to assist folks discover assets,” Thurston instructed me.

“Folks have been calling in to us providing data for different individuals who have been stranded,” she says. “Throughout blackouts we have been on the air, attempting to assist folks discover locations to go to seek out gasoline and primary provides. No person else had a call-in to permit listeners to take part, not simply with their opinions however to supply newsworthy data, immediately, on the air. It actually did really feel like we have been offering a neighborhood service.”

The way forward for KGO’s hosts is as unsure because the locations for his or her orphaned listeners. Thompson is launching a YouTube channel Wednesday and will discover different digital choices equivalent to podcasts, although these don’t lend themselves to interacting with listeners in actual time, as radio does. Others will attempt to discover houses on different stations.

KGO’s new listeners might be plied with syndicated sports activities applications, together with such hosts because the notable blowhard Jim Rome — who already reached Bay Space listeners by way of KNBR — and eight hours of sports activities betting ideas each weekday.

“It’s a rattling, soiled disgrace,” Thurston says. “KGO is a legacy radio station, and it didn’t should occur like this.”