According to David Brauer, the Twin Cities’ Clear Channel stations are outsourcing their news.
Not to Bangalore, Manila or Mumbai, funny as that would be. But almost as good:
Not that anyone listens to the local Clear Channel radio family (KFAN, K102, KOOL 108, KDWB, Cities 97) for the newscasts, but amid budget-slashing, the Denver Post reports the Mile High City’s KOA-AM “will now provide news for four other markets: Colorado Springs/Pueblo, Ft. Collins, Minneapolis and Ft. Smith, Arkansas.”
The biggest impact might be felt at conservative talk station KTLK, where host-newscaster chatter has at time produced some interesting exchanges. I can’t wait to hear some Colorado drone get Little Rock, Red Rocks and Rocori mixed up. Talk about your Rocky Mountain oy-sters!
Har.
Well, good for Denver, anyway. KOA – the WCCO of Denver – has always had a commitment to doing commercial radio news; if they have a niche that’ll keep some jobs open, good for them. Expect more of this sort of thing.
More interesting, perhaps? Brauer calls KTLK “conservative”. Now, when KTLK-FM went on the air, it steered aggressively down the middle; it had drunk the post-’04 Koolaid that “conservative talk is dead”, so other than Limbaugh and Hannity the station steered well clear of the “conservative” label.
But with Chris Baker, Limbaugh, Hannity, Jason Lewis and Glenn Beck anchoring the station these days, it’d seem the consultants were wrong again. Which should shock nobody that’s ever worked in radio, but it’s nice to see the market put a bullet in that meme’s head once and for all.
I don’t know why this would surprise anybody not in the media. Haven’t you ever heard of Paul Harvey? He was the nation’s premier radio news reader for ages (and one of my heros, to boot). This isn’t anything new.
Look, there are only about three major sources of news in the world: AP, UPI, and Reuters. Everybody else – the Strib, WCCO, MPR – they all subscribe to the news service.
That means one reporter in his office types up a story and e-mails it to every news department across the country, who edit the story to match their local prejudices. TV stations give it to a handsome man or pretty woman to read on camera. Radio stations give it to a pleasant speaker to read on radio. Newspapers print the edited story. But it’s basically the same story, spread nationwide, from a single source. Hell, with USA Today, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal home delivery, it’s EXACTLY the same story published nation-wide.
So this morning you heard about swine flu on the radio, on the TV, in the newspaper. Wow, if everybody’s saying something, it must be true, right? NO, they’re just all reading you the same lie, over various forms of media.
Given that, then what’s the point of having one guy in Minneapolis read the news story on KTLK, while another guy in Denver reads the same story on KOA? Why not have the Denver guy read it and mail the tape to Minneapolis? And to Detroit, while we’re at it.
If Rush can distribute the same show nationwide from Florida, why can’t the newsreaders do it? Tom Brokaw’s doing it on television now. Paul Harvey did it in the past.
You’d think history was only invented January 21st.
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Heh. I’m both with ya and agin’ ya.
Radio news has been largely an oxymoron for most of the past fifty years. Even back when stations had a legal imperative to run local news, it was largely rip-‘n-read; stations that were actually committed to news (like ‘CCO, KOA, KBEM) actually did local reporting, but by the eighties even that was largely 20-second summaries of even the most complicated reporting jobs. Serious radio news was largely a public radio thing by the nineties (and very rare even before that).
The economics of format-driven commercial radio make real “journalism” difficult under the best of circumstances.
I’m hoping to hear a newscast from these dudes when the stories are out of Shakopee, Mahtomedi and Wayzata.
If memory serves, Clear Channel Radio pioneered the technology of remotely operating stations. They would broadcast news, dj interviews, music etc from one studio operation to various cities all the while making it seem “local” because they would mention a local event, happening or place in between songs. They also had a company that would monitor the various traffic cam’s and reports from one place and then make it sound local even though the person reading the report was some where else. As I travel around the country, I often hear the same people doing traffic or news or playing the hits. I think I read in some publication that their “KISS” branded format had young teenage girls showing up at various broadcast studios across the country when some teen heartthrob was interviewed by the morning DJ and made it sound local even though the interview was done in LA. CBS Radio has Jack FM in the Twin Cities, but there is also Jack FM all over the country and in Canada. Same deadpan voice talent and same music.
I don’t know if you have ever heard of him or not, Mitch, but Randy Michaels used to run Clear Channel Radio, and made it into a major force in “vertically integrating” owned, leased and managed stations. He also integrated the station, concert promotion and ticket sales, all through venues Clear Channel owned. When people would complain about this practice he claimed that this was no different than stations eliminating studio orchestras after WWII or taking, as a commenter noted above, syndicated news.
They should have kept Dan Conry.
More conservative, more personality, more fun, and more Jumparound.