right-wing radio

[yesthattom]

In the 80's, talk radio was doing badly and everyone was predicting its doom.  However, some rich right-wing people saw it as an opportunity.  They bought up these stations on the cheap, turned them around by changing their format, and made money AND created the entire right-wing radio phenomena we struggle against today.

In the 80s those people were "crazy", now we think those people were "visionary".

Newspapers are doing badly and everyone is predicting their doom.  Thus, they are very inexpensive.  Why aren't rich liberals buying up newspapers on the cheap?  Yes, they'd be called "crazy", but in 15 years won't they be "visionary"?

If you buy a newspaper, I'll be your CIO.

How about it?

Comments

[anselm23.livejournal.com]

How much does a Newspaper cost, do you suppose?

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Newspapers are valued typically at 10X their annual gross revenues.
Compare with TV stations - at 5X.


Newspapers are not cheap.

[qnetter]

Why aren't rich liberals buying up newspapers on the cheap? Yes, they'd be called "crazy", but in 15 years won't they be "visionary"?

For the same reason nobody's buying up all those horses and buggy whip factories. There's a difference between changing tastes -- which are cyclical -- and obsolescence -- which is not.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

I more or less agree.

I think liberals should do as much as they (we) can to grab up electronic/internet media. It's expensive, but I really think this is the wave of the future. For now, blogs are the way to go, and eventually...

"I was there" for the start of the talk radio phenomenon in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. (I actually lived in San Diego, but most of the LA AM stations reach San Diego, too.) It started out with "talk radio therapists" -- nice, sweet women mostly. My dad really liked them. And there were a few right-wingish or libertarian men, but most people thought they were nuts, and listened to them for entertainment.

My, how things changed ... We went from Sally Jesse Raphael to Dr. Laura. Tom Leykis -- who used to be reasonable and more or less liberal -- went way out on the libertarian anti-feminist fringes. I can't stand to listen to him anymore. And some of the real wingnuts who were on the Christian stations are now part of the mainstream.

[lilbjorn.livejournal.com]

The number one local internet destination in every city in America belongs to its local newspaper. That's why liberals should buy them. Yes, the paper-based newspaper is suffering. But media is all about branding and local newspapers have it out the wazoo. Use that branding correctly, and the newspaper corporation for your media power base and you control the political spin for an entire region.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

It's only a horse and buggy if you let it be. If I owned a newspaper right now, I would make it be completely hip and different. There are so many things that one can do with the online edition (PDF version, iPod audio, full archives, other ideas I have that are a bit more experimental). Plus, the paper version would be totally hip. Why don't young people read newspapers? Because they only offer what you get on TV and its 12-24 hours later. So I'd have things that TV/internet doesn't offer... comic strips a on nearly every page instead of one page; and stories that go into much more detail than TV does.

Just like everyone thought AM radio was "horse and buggy" material until Rush reinvented it.

[qnetter]

Young people don't read newspapers because you have to read them -- they don't dance and sing at you.

[vees.livejournal.com]

I'd still be buying stock in satellite radio.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

So how do you plan to alter the format to make them more relevant/attractive?

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can compare radio stations to newspapers. There is nothing that makes a newspaper a particularly scarce resource; when you buy it, you get the brand name (goodwill, reputation, etc.) and the existing readership. Those are worth something, but will devalue quickly if they are not kept up. But anyone can start a newspaper, and newspapers merge, fold, etc. with regularity.

On the other hand, over and above the brand name, a radio station has an intrinsic value, which is the government-granted monopoly of a broadcast license and spectrum allocation. You can flip the format of a radio station, change its call letters, and quickly build an entirely different listenership (and demographics for ad rates). You can't do that with newspapers, which are more of less locked into the format of a metro daily, with hard news, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, etc. If you bought the Star-Ledger and "changed format" to a progressive opinion journal (or a right-wing opinion journal, for that matter), it would quickly become worthless.

By the way, I would note that major metro dailies and broadcast stations tend to be of roughly the same valuation; for example, the San Francisco Chronicle was sold to the Hearst chain for $660 million, while KRON-TV (which had been previously owned by the Chronicle some years earlier) sold for $823 million, and then dropped its NBC affiliation.

[b00jum.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. I disagree with the people who think the value is worthless or the format is locked. No matter the sugar plum visions we have of living in a digital world, a large demographic is and will stay analog.

As to locked format - nothing stays the same, but to be fair it may take time to move the format. I think that buying a progressive leaning paper would be the way to go (not as far to move). Perhaps taking over a weekly paper?

More radical would be a media merge. Have a web/blog-O-sphere, hardcopy news and radio station (mostly news). Information could be shared between all of them. The trick is to get notoriety as a web destination along with a solid reputation as a newspaper. Ok, maybe the idea is not that radical, but certainly doing it right would be.

Here's a slant on news I'd like to see: Hard News, Hard Facts. All too often the news "dumbs down" the information we get. I'd like to see more in depth reporting, even if its to linked articles. Perhaps there could be a format where all short (headline) news articles linked into a portal for that topic that could have links to related articles (both in and out), podcasts, discussions and external resources. One of the frustrations I have with many news items is that its hard to get follow up. If it was a topic that really interested me, I'd subscribe to a high quality rss feed for updates.