Quote:
Originally Posted by MarioMania
(Post 3112030)
So you want AM to be a wasteland?
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No. I do not want AM radio in this country to be any kind of wasteland. I do feel, however, that since most music programming has migrated to FM, the AM broadcast band is all but useless for anything other than syndicated talk shows, repeated across the dial at different times of the day, religion, and sports. The few music stations left on AM are, as I mentioned in my last post, mostly low-power oldies and/or nostalgia stations located in small towns or suburbs of large cities.
Many of these AM stations are going silent for financial reasons, or because their owners feel there is more money to be made with the stations' programming on FM. There was a small, daytime-only station in a semi-rural town about ten miles south of me that went silent several years ago, the reason being that the company to which it was licensed also operated an FM station and the AM station didn't draw the listener base the licensee had hoped it would. The AM station was also literally falling apart (poorly anchored and tilting towers, etc.), using outdated studio gear, and so on. It went on the air in 1969 and tried no fewer than four formats, none of which generated the revenue the station needed to remain on the air. The last format the station tried, in 2004 or 2005 if memory serves, was a satellite-delivered sports format (no local live air personalities) from the Sporting News Radio network, but that one failed miserably; that was when the owners finally decided to pull the plug on it and send the license back to the FCC for cancellation. The station, WATJ on 1560 kHz in Chardon, Ohio was never heard from again.
The foregoing is, unfortunately, what is happening to many small, low-power AM stations in the US, and is already happening (has happened, in many cities) to AM radio in Canada. (Some Canadian cities, even large suburbs, have no AM stations whatsoever now because of this.) It is no one's fault; the stations are going silent because of dwindling listener bases. Fewer listeners means less advertising revenue, which in turn means less money to keep the stations on the air. The big 50kW talk and news-talk stations are surviving (and have survived for decades) because they are owned by the CBS and ABC radio networks; small one-lunger peanut-whistle stations in medium-size or downright small towns aren't that fortunate. That is, they will stay on the air as long as the businesses for which they advertise can stay in business, but one slip can and often does mean the business(es) will fail--and the radio station may go with it, if its survival depends in large part or totally on the advertising for the business(es) that had to close for good.
I sometimes wonder about the future of a small, 1kW AM station in the next town south of me. It was a full-service (music, news) AM local station for most of its existence since it went on the air 58 years ago, but it now (since about five years or so ago) is almost 100 percent automated, except for a live morning program. I am thinking that one of these days, because it is automated and depends on local ad revenue, and since it is located in a city that is not considered suburban Cleveland, it may have no choice but to leave the air permanently; that or else revert to being a daytime-only station, as it was when it first signed on in 1956.
A similar situation exists for a 0.5-kW station in a Cleveland suburb, but the chances of that station going silent are slim to none since it is a well-established suburban broadcaster. That station's call sign is WINT; it runs 0.5 kW daytime, 0.042kW (forty-two watts) directional nighttime on 1330 kHz, and has been on the air in eastern Lake County, Ohio since 1965. It was also once a full-service radio station, but its owners recently decided to convert it to automated, satellite-delivered talk.
