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| Dave Becker |
A couple of days ago I got
an email from Dave Becker, Director of Programming at Nevada Public Radio in
Las Vegas. Dave and I chat every once in
awhile about media trends and I know reads this blog for the latest Nielsen
Audio estimates.
Dave has been watching the
unprecedented success of NPR news/talk stations in the past couple of years. In his email
to me, Dave pointed out something from the August PPM sweeps that I hadn’t noticed:
“In combing through August
Nielsen numbers a couple of weeks back, I got curious about recent news/talk
station ratings. I did a little checking and discovered that in the almost-50
PPM markets, the top-ranked news/talk station in 20 of them is the NPR
affiliate.
"The usual suspects are in
there – San Francisco; WAMU, Washington, Seattle, San Diego, Portland, Austin,
Raleigh-Durham. But now there are
several markets where the NPR news/talk station is now topping legendary
commercial news/talk stations such as in Denver, the Twin Cities, Nashville,
Baltimore and Dallas.
"Plus, there were a few
surprises in markets where news/talk doesn’t generally fare that well. In the
August numbers, the NPR affiliate is now
the top news/talk station in Miami, Riverside...and Las Vegas.
"I’m pretty certain that a
generation ago none of these stations would have been anywhere near this position."
(The full list of the
twenty markets where this is the case are: San Francisco, Dallas, Washington DC,
Miami, Seattle (two stations), the Twin Cities, San Diego, Denver, Baltimore, Portland, Charlotte,
Riverside, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Austin, San Jose, Raleigh, Nashville, Greensboro
and Hartford.)
I told Dave I have a
theory about what is causing this trend. First, NPR News sounds better than
ever. Plus, it seems like the NPR news/talk stations are adding listeners, even
though PUR/PUMM is falling a bit each year. The NPR news/talk stations are
attracting higher cume at the when the “listener lake” is getting smaller. I
think the old-line commercial news/talkers are going in the other direction –
when PUR/PUMM slides they do to. Caveat: I don't have enough access to Nielsen
data to prove this theory but this the way I see it.
Dave is correct when he
said that a generation ago none of these stations would have been beating
commercial radio news/talk giants. But it is happening now.
I happened to have the
Arbitron numbers for Fall 2000 handy and I decided to compare the estimated
weekly listeners in Fall 2000 with the August 2017 PPM numbers.
The chart on the right is
what I observed. I had Fall 2000 data from 12 of Dave’s 20 markets. Keep in mind Arbitron was using Diary
methodology in 2000, so this comparison is “oranges and nectarines.”
The amazing growth of
weekly cume clearly shows that NPR news/talk stations are drawing new listeners
in record numbers, even as the number of competitive news choices has
mushroomed.
THE DEATH OF A GREAT LEADER: GARY FRIES
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| Gary Fries |
You may have seen the
story in the radio trade press about the death of Gary Fries, the beloved former head of
the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB). I
knew Gary from Transtar Radio Network, an upstart, wildly successful new media
venture: Satellite-delivered radio formats.
The truth about Transtar
was that Gary Fries made the business happen.
Transtar’s owners had important skills.
Bill Moyes was the go-to researcher who practically invented music
research. C. T. “Terry” Robinson had connections to folks with money and he could
sing The Eve of Destruction like he
was channeling Barry McGuire.
But Gary Fries new how
radio stations operated and what station owners needed, a perspective Moyes and
Robinson didn’t have. Fries was known and respected by corporate directors and
small-market GMs.
Perhaps most importantly,
Gary Fries was a leader. In a biz where there are a lot of showboats and big-talkers,
Fries was truly the real deal. He was loyal to the people on his team. He loved to teach newbies like me. He was so driven that he sometimes scared the
shit out of me.
Fries used to give me a
hard time about my attraction to public radio. But he was the guy who pulled
the strings that helped me get the job as GM at KCSN in LA. At the time, that was the biggest break of my career.
Maybe ten years ago Gary
called me out-of-the-blue one day. He
had seen my name in Radio & Records
for something I was doing. He told me:
“Ken, that public radio thing is working well for
you and I am so pleased with your success. You were one of the best sales
people we had at Transtar and I don’t know if I ever said thanks.”
Thank you, Gary.
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