Imagine buying a large car, a Cadillac from GM. After owning the company for two years, they slowly grew a line of much cheaper looking and feeling cars, and introduced a bargain model or two. Then imagine the company sitting around scratching its head when customers started leaving, blaming the market and that people weren’t using the money item luxury
Change the product from cars radio and you just explained the clear Channel entry on Louisville radio.
Serena Channel has been a force in local radio since the mid-80s, when it bought 50,000 Watt station WHAS (840-AM), and WAMZ (97.5 FM) from Serena Channel Communications in 1985, when the stations were put up for sale. The Byngham Family. The purchase was not unwise, given the station’s dominance in local markets, with the two stations typically coming in at No. 1 and No. 2 in the local books.
For a few years, it seemed to leave the Serena Channel untouched. QUIT was Louisville’s beacon to the rest of the country, spreading news and talk, and also music> to the rest of the country. /a>. WHAS’s news department rivaled that of many television stations and was allowed to capture large sections of the program, with local reporters being allowed to cover local stories, including investigative and human interest coverage.
The traffic business ran its own helicopter, which it often took off for long periods of time, if conditions warranted it, if conditions forced the typical use. The weather was provided by WHAS TV astrologers, but the weather remained exclusive, with the astrologers doing their weather reports live and radio coverage only extending during severe weather.
Since then the station has been slow to freefall. The first sign that things would be different was the replacement of the local program with Rush Limbaugh from noon to 3 PM. The next changes appeared in his news department. The number of reporters began to decrease, the time devoted to news began to shrink, and longfeature stories almost disappeared.
The next event was Rock And Roll Restoration, an overnight music show hosted by the walking encyclopedia of rock. and Joe Donovan’s history rolls. Donovan used his extensive record collection to fill the night with hours of sound, airchecks, and trivia from the rock music 50’s, 60’s , 70 and 70 He was of course fired when Serena Channel decided they wanted to stop playing music on the station and focus on cheaper talk. If Serena Channel had any business sense, it would have left the show alone and given Donovan the opportunity to go national with a syndicated program. Instead they replaced it with another local talk show, which they soon canceled and replaced with Coast to Coast AM.
The changes were therefore more subtle. Their business, which once famously used its helicopter to search for the 1974 tornado that tore through Louisville, has been turned into a place for displays. The announcement was made from the report traffic, which ditched the helicopter and is now trusted by eyewitnesses, traffic cameras, and told the police to delivering a traffic report that was about 30 minutes after the event, and rarely told you what you really need to know (like how to avoid it.) The weather, which was previously done on TV, was dedicated to WHAS. The radio metrologist was replaced all the time by WAVE 3, in a venture that made money for Channel Serena.
The problem with this became clear during our first severe storms. WHAS have you always been where you turned when your power went out during a major storm. Instead of having its own coverage, WHAM switched its only feed to TV coverage. Maybe I just didn’t love radios enough, but hearing a meteorologist tell me to “follow the radar path” doesn’t quite cut it when I’m sitting in a dark room where I can’t even see. proper shoes
The final straw was a few weeks ago when the Serena Channel decided to remove a call-in show that had been around for decades, firing the show’s blind host, Joe Elliott. Rather than focusing on two extreme issues and people fighting, or encouraging people who want to call everyone to the same opinion, Elliott focused on things both controversial and mundane, and people who didn’t want to listen. He supports his opinion.
While I didn’t agree with all of Elliott’s beliefs, Elliott’s show was a nice place to discuss and hear the local issues of the day. Serena Channel decided Elliott could air yet another syndicated show that involves a conservative voice, Michael Savage.
Just as Clear Channel and companies are taking away the one selling point of radio (the local nature), they are taking away the one aspect that most people listen to. The difference between the product and the quality of the people can be made by the numbers. WHAS’ selling was a point so you know you can always turn to them when you need local news, traffic, weather and soil a few minutes from certain report.
Now the WHY is just another media outlet pushing the same data or less than the other outlets available to you, and somehow no faster than what you can get elsewhere. While Louisville AM radio will likely be a player for years to come, simply because of the strength of its signal, it will no longer attract the number of listeners it used to or the commanding local pride it used to instill.
