Radio Waves Podcast #359

 Radio October 28, 2022

            Longtime KNX (1070 AM, 97.1 FM) anchor Dick Helton recently left the station to start his official retirement after 24 years at the all-news station. His last broadcast was October 14th, wrapping up a career that spanned over a half century — 53 years, to be exact — including many 29 years at sister all news station WBBM/Chicago, where he reported news and was found just prior to joining KNX in 1998. He worked for one company, or at least one company and the remnants of the company that took it over, his entire career. First known as CBS, it is now Audacy, which bought CBS Radio a few years ago.

            In case that didn’t sink in, Helton’s 53 year career was spent at just two stations … that is impressive, to say the least . Almost unheard of. You can hear his last 15 minutes on the air (or so … commercials take up a substantial portion of the quarter hour … it IS Audacy, you know) — including a few tributes — at https://bit.ly/3Ddxu7Z.

            His most memorable moment? Hard to say. But he did mention on the air that one of his highlights included reading over the wire services in 1970 that The Beatles were breaking up. Helton called Apple Records in London, and was able to get through to George Harrison, who gave him details.

            He met his wife (Carol Ramos) at WBBM, got married in 1995, and moved out to Los Angeles when she landed at former Los Angeles talk radio leader KABC (790 AM) in 1997. Helton, on the air at KNX, competed against Ramos for a time.

            In signing off, he said “I can’t imagine having done anything else in my life. Every day, behind the microphone, well it’s felt like the right place to be. One of my colleagues at WBBM ended his broadcasts by saying ‘may all the news in your life be good!’ … I wish that for each and every one of you. Thanks for listening.”

            Helton’s replacement is afternoon drive reporter Mike Simpson, who joins Helton’s former morning team-mates Jennifer York and Vicki Moore. Moore has worked morning drive on KNX since 2004 and had been paired with Helton since 2008

            You Better You Bet

            KGO/San Francisco — sister station to KABC — recently dropped its formerly respected and longtime — 80 years — talk format in favor of … sports betting.

            Really. Sports betting. Yeah, there’s a winner. Sure.

            Let’s see what it brings to the table. Money, maybe, from online betting companies., assuming California ever legalizes gambling for the masses. Cheap syndicated programming, to keep costs down as owner Cumulus Media likes to do. And no waste of actual listener time, as no one actually cares about betting information on the radio and it is pretty much a guarantee that few, if any, listeners will ever tune in.

            Online entertainment and podcast services gave Cumulus Media executives awards of Employee of the Month for helping push listeners away from radio and toward their own pay services.

            Will the format fail? You can bet on it. Sports radio itself rarely succeeds in the ratings; sports betting has an even lower appeal. When your “best” and most appealing program is the awful syndicated Jim Rome Show, and your filler is the even worse CBS SportsRadio, there is no way up.

            Will it come to KABC? The odds are that it will. Executives at Cumulus are that stupid.

            New Programs

            K-Mozart (1260 AM, 105.1 HD2) has added some new programs to the lineup, including Broadway to Hollywood and The New Opera House. Both programs are hosted by opera performer Audrey Yoder.

            Broadway to Hollywood debuted with a presentation of  Fiddler on the Roof — including a portion in Yiddish — on October 15th; the program airs every Saturday at 9 a.m. with repeats Sunday nights at 6 p.m. The primary emphasis is musicals from, well, anywhere from Broadway to Hollywood and all places in between … hence the name. 

            The New Opera House launched October 16th at airs every Sunday night at 8:00. The first program featured an airing of West Side Story including the original cast. Future programs will run the gamut from “old school” to modern progressive; the intention is to expose music that is rarely heard on the radio in Los Angeles.

            Yoder is a local opera performer featured in performances in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. K-Mozart owner Saul Levine is extremely proud of the new programs, as well as the ability to add Yoder to the station roster. “At a time when the big shots are degrading radio, I am proud that a little family owned station is still creating interesting programming to serve the public and not Wall Street,” Levine said. 

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Radio Waves Podcast #358

 Radio: October 21, 2022

            He was among the first DJs to play rock and roll records on the radio in Southern California. He was among the first to do listener dedications on the radio. He was the man who coined the term “Oldies but Goodies” and later launched a record company dedicated to the preservation of those tunes. The year 2022 marked 79 continuous years on the air.

            Unfortunately, 2022 also marked the passing of the radio legend who accomplished all of the above and much more. Art Laboe passed away October 7th at the age of 97.

            Laboe — his given name is Arthur Egnoian — was born in Utah, where he lived until the age of 13. His sister gave him his first radio when he was just eight years old, and as Laboe said many times he was “just enthralled by it.”

            Moving to California, he graduated from Washington High School in Los Angeles, attended Stanford University, and served in the United States Navy during World War II. 

            His radio career began at KSAN in San Francisco in part because he held a full radio telegram broadcast license, and the station needed licensed announcers, having lost many to the war effort. As told by LARadio.Com’s Don Barrett,

            “With some trepidation he went to the station and was taken to see the general manager, a gruff man who declared that Art had a squeaky voice and was too young. 

            “‘I kicked the ground and started to walk away,’Art recalled. ‘And then he says, ‘Besides, you have to have an FCC license. We need at least a 3rd Class license. We’re a combo station.’ I walked back and pulled out of my jacket pocket these certificates and said, 'You mean one of these?' 

            ‘I laid out a First Phone, 2nd Telephone and a Ham license. He looked up at me and said, ‘You’re hired.’ He put his arm around me and said, come with me. He took me to a room with three huge transmitter boxes and asked me if I could tune one of these things. I told him I thought so.’ 

            “There was a sign on butcher paper in the transmitter room on the wall: If these damn things works leave it alone. Art asked him why he was hiring him. The radio station owner had been operating illegally because all his engineers had been drafted into the war. ‘Now with your First Class license, I’m legal again,’ the owner said. ‘That First Class license got me my first job in radio’”

            It was at KSAN where he took on the name of Art Laboe, a suggestion by a boss to sound more American. 

            But it was in the Los Angeles area where he made his mark. He started hosting live broadcasts where teens from all over the area — and of all races and cultural backgrounds — would come to hear the latest records and be part of a burgeoning music scene. You might say that Laboe helped to desegregate the city through music and dedications.

            He launched Original Sound Records to impress a young lady. As he explained when he received an LA Radio People achievement award from Barrett in 2012, one evening he was visiting a young lady at her apartment. As they were “getting to know each other,” the young lady wanted Laboe to keep the mood going by playing the "right song” … the problem being that the short 45 RPM records kept running out -  spoiling the mood, and forcing him to get off the couch, go over and put on another record.  

            His idea: a long play record with multiple hits on each side. Which means, if you’ve been paying attention, Original Sound Records (and the Oldies but Goodies music they held) was basically born out of the same reason many fans of the series bought them: to be more successful romantically.

            In 1975, he essentially saved KRLA (now KRDC, 1110 AM) by mixing those Oldies but Goodies with current music and creating HitRadio 11, a format of exceptionally wide appeal by its very nature of playing music that cuts across racial and ethnic lines — as Laboe had done since his 1952 arrival in Los Angeles. His request and dedication program brought people back to the station, which had languished for many years due to an ownership dispute.

            At the time there were only two DJs on KRLA, Laboe and Johnny Hayes. They covered the entire day with the help of tape recordings, though most listeners couldn’t tell …  Laboe mornings and evenings; Hayes in the mid days. The format helped propel KRLA toward the top of the ratings.

            KRLA “Hitmen” traveled the streets of Southern California, giving away money and prizes for having your radio tuned to 11-10, even if, as happened once, the radio was tuned there in part because it was broken and couldn’t tune anything else. Didn’t matter, though, the passengers in the car loved KRLA so much that they were fine with it being stuck there.

            Laboe was among the first — if not the first — DJ to program to the vast market of Latino listeners in East Los Angeles, creating a loyalty among fans that is unheard of. Generations of families listen to The Art Laboe Connection, heard locally Sundays from 7 p.m. to midnight Sunday evenings on KDAY (93.5 FM) and on Old School 104.7 FM in the Inland Empire weeknights from 9 p.m. to midnight, as well as about a dozen more throughout California, Nevada and Arizona. At press time the future of the program was unknown.

            It was once said that the format Laboe helped create at KRLA was one that four generations — grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren — would all listen to … together. Family radio from the guy who stayed on the air until he died. Laboe was absolutely one of a kind, and he will be missed by fans everywhere.

Radio Waves Podcast #357

Radio Waves: October 14, 2022

Special series highlights American Experience on KBLA

Big news from KBLA (1580 AM) – the station is producing a series of special programs under the umbrella title of Agenda for America, an African-American Perspective. Every Thursday night from 7 to 9 p.m. through the end of October, a focus on different issues will be (or has been) presented. The State of Black Women in America was presented on the 6th; The State of Black Youth in America on the 13th; The State of Black Men in America on the 20th, and the big one hosted by station owner Tavis Smiley himself on the 27th will be Why we Can’t Wait – the Urgency of Now.

Missed them love or want to hear them again? No problems – the station has a full podcast lineup at kbla1580.com.

And while these are locally produced by hosts at KBLA, Smiley is making the programs available to stations across the country in a sort of loosely organized national network of stations, perhaps leading to official affiliates in the future.

KBLA just celebrated its first birthday as an “unapologetically progressive” talk station, having launched on June 19 — Juneteenth — of 2021. Primary hosts include Dominique Diprima, Lynn Richardson, Najah Roberts, DL Highly, Don Amiche, Zo Williams, Danny Morrison, and of course Smiley himself, who has experience both in talk radio and television, and is a successful author as well as the recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Not just politics … its also entertainment, crypto currency, humor, celebrities … kind of a modern version of what KABC (790 AM) did in their heyday. Smiley calls it a “conversation,” explaining that he feels “we are at our best when we are challenging (our listeners) to reexamine the assumptions that they hold; we are at our best when we are helping people to expand their inventory of ideas. That only happens through dialog, not monologue.”

New Programs

K-Mozart (1260 AM, 105.1 HD2) is adding some new programs to the lineup, including Broadway to Hollywood and The New Opera House. Both programs are hosted by opera performer Audrey Yoder.

Broadway to Hollywood debuts with Fiddler on the Roof — including a portion in Yiddish — Saturday, October 15th at 9 a.m. and will air weekly with repeats Sunday nights at 6 p.m. The program will air musicals from, well, anywhere from Broadway to Hollywood and all places in between … hence the name. Next week: Oklahoma!

The New Opera House launches Sunday, October 16th at 8 p.m. with an airing of West Side Story featuring the original cast. Future programs will run the gamut from “old school” to modern progressive; the intention is to expose music that is rarely heard on the radio in Los Angeles.

Yoder is a local opera performer heard in performances in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo opera houses. Station owner Saul Levine is extremely proud of the new programs, as well as the ability to add Yoder to the station roster. “At a time when the big shots are degrading radio, I am proud that a little family owned station is still creating interesting programming to serve the public and not Wall Street,” Levine said. 

In addition to the new programs, Levine says that the station will present a live direct feed to the Detroit Symphony at 7:45 a.m. and will be playing a full CD of Disney movie themes performed by Lang Lang. Both broadcasts will be on Friday, October 14th. 

September Nielsens

KOST (103.5 FM) maintained its ratings dominance in the September ratings released last week. Just shy of the holiday season when it switches to Christmas music, the station earned a 5.8 share of the audience, beating out sister station KBIG’s (My FM, 104.3) 5.5. KRTH (101.1 FM) was third at 5.1, followed by KFI (640 AM) at 4.7 and KTWV (94.7 FM) at 4.4.

Like the top-five, there were few surprises. Alt 98.7 FM (KYSR) was the alternative leader as it has been for a ling time now, beating out KROQ (106.7 FM) 2.7 to 2.1. That 2.1 finish is actually a blessing for KROQ, however, as it had been languishing in the mid to high 1s for a while. Go Country 105.1 FM (KKGO) was tied with KJLH (102.3 FM)  and KSCA (101.9 FM) for 16th at 2.4. Remember when former KZLA owner Emmis said Country doesn’t work in Los Angeles? (Where is Emmis now?) And Steve Wonder’s KJLH continues its success by maintaining its highest ratings trend in its history.

Power 106 (KPWR, 105.9 FM)? Still at 1.5 … far lower than the ratings the station had under Chuck Martin when it was top-40 K-WEST. Just sayin’ since the market is overcrowded with urban-leaning repetitive hit stations and is totally lacking a straight-ahead top-40 station attracting a broad audience matching the demographics of the city, as Martin had done at both KHJ (930 AM) and K-WEST … again, just sayin.’

Each rating is an estimate of listeners aged 6 and over tuned to a station between the hours of 6 a.m. and 12 midnight, as determined by Nielsen.

1. KOST (5.8) 2. KBIG “My FM” (5.5) 3. KRTH (5.1) 4. KFI (4.7) 5. KTWV “The Wave” (4.4) 6. KLVE (3.9) 7. KCBS-FM “Jack” (3.6) 8. KNX-AM/FM (3.5) 9. KIIS (3.2) 10. KLOS (3.0)

11. KRCD (2.8) 12. KRRL “Real,”  KYSR “Alt” (2.7) 14. KLAX, KPCC (2.6) 16. KJLH, KKGO “Go Country,” KSCA (2.4) 19. KBUE, KXOL (2.2)

21.KLLI “Cali,” KROQ (2.1) 23. KLYY (1.9) 24. KUSC (1.8) 25. KPWR “Power” (1.5) 26. KKJZ “K-Jazz” (1.3) 27. KLAC (1.2) 28. KCRW, KDLD (1.1) 30. KDAY, KFWB (1.0)

32. KEIB (0.9) 33. KRLA (0.8) 34. KABC, KFSH (0.7) 36. KCSN “88.5” (0.6) 37. KSPN, KWIZ (0.5) 39. KKLA, KRTH Online Stream (0.3)

41. KTNQ, KWKW (0.2) 43. KHJ, KIRN, KPFK, KROQ Online Stream, KTWV Online Stream (0.1)

Radio Waves Podcast #356

Special Guest:  KBLA 1580 owner and show host Tavis Smiley.  Tavis talks about building his independent station in a very crowded LA marketplace.

 Readers Write Back

A few weeks ago, I asked your opinion on what you would do if you could program a local station. Interestingly, few responses actually answered the question but numerous letters reflected on radio listening habits. Such as:

“I am a big fan of AM-FM radio. My friends are like what you described in the recent OC Register article regarding commercials. And as you point out, that is what bugs me and makes me turn more to XM for music/talk radio.

“For AM I want news, sports and talk radio.  I only want opinion radio for the channels that state that, say KFI 640.  But as you discuss prior, KNX 1070 is the only news station but they are very opinionated and slanted and are an arm of CBS news (at least in their bias).

“Another issue you covered in prior articles is the week signal some key stations have.  Like ESPN Sports (KSPN, 710 AM) which is hard to hear in Orange County in the evenings.

“But I think most of my frustrations you outlined. If I hear the damn ‘Kars for Kids’ commercial (charity) or get the sense of it, I change the channel and might not come back.  It is like nails on a chalk board for me.

‘I like Mike Greenberg on KLAA (830 AM) around the 8 o’clock hour in the morning,  but rarely listen, because I swear he has 45 minutes of commercials and the commercials breaks are ten minutes.

“When I listened to more FM, supplemented by podcasts at work, what bothered me was too much replay of the same music. I agree Go Country is great.

“My favorite station for my morning commute if not Stuart Varney on Fox Business, is Full Ride on ESPNU with Chris Childers and Rick Neuheisel. Great stories, interviews and conversation. Plus how can you not like a show where one anchor is called the Show Pony and has the attention span of a gnat. Thank you!” — Mike Foulger

Clock Radio Question

“I read your article months ago about HD tuners. I have a call in to Sangean to discuss with them the features of the HDR-18 clock radio. I am not computer savvy but I would like to purchase a good radio and your article stated that Sangean is a good product for radios. Would you know if Sangean  still sells this radio?” — Genny Tyler

I am a fan of Sangean. They make some great radios for long distance reception, and the HD Radio tuners are well designed. The HDR-18 is still listed as a current model with a price of about $150 on Amazon at press time and mostly positive reviews.

HD Radio is the digital broadcasting system authorized in the United States, which sends a digital stream along with the regular analog signal that normal radios can pick up. The HD radio tuner decodes the stream, giving extra channels on many FM stations and arguably better sound on both AM and FM stations that broadcast in HD.

The problem is that few AM stations still use the HD system, and FM reception is often spotty in the home without an outdoor antenna. So while in the past, I would have recommended looking into it, I am now thinking that smart speakers and smartphones with apps is the better way to go. Almost all AM and FM stations (including the extra channels) stream their signals over the internet, and in most cases the apps actually work better.

That being said, this is considered a good radio with excellent sound and a good — though at night in a bedroom possibly overly bright — display. It also has two alarms and can play sound in stereo through the headphone jack. So anyone looking for a table radio or clock radio might consider it.

Streaming the Oldies

I’ll have a full ratings analysis next month when the September Nielsens are released, but I found something quite impressive that has been building over time and showing up even more in the last few months: streaming radio, especially when it comes to oldies, er, classic rock or whatever oldies stations like to call themselves these days.

Over the past six months, KRTH’s (101.1 FM) only stream has averaged a 0.3 share, representing approximately 0.3 percent of the radio audience aged six and over turned to the online simulcast of their regular signal. Two of the months were 0.4!

To put that into perspective, there are at least full power over the air stations that earn that level or less. And if you combined the stream ratings with KRTH’s over the air ratings, the station would have been number one, rather than number two, in the August Nielsens released in early September.

KRTH features the highest-rated stream in town. That’s impressive.
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