Once again, the AM Radio plug puller strikes, this time -- once again -- it's striking in my second motherland: Canada.
The Canadian media company Corus has decided to eliminate some staff and then eventually switch off -- or sell, if they can find buyers -- two AM stations in two major, Western Canadian cities, Vancouver and Edmonton.
The stations are CKGO 730 (All Traffic), and CHQT 880, Edmonton (News and Traffic). I usually can hear CKGO day, or night, on 730. It's a constant traffic report, basically. They even run traffic reports overnights. It sounds like they use live announcers, too. I'm not sure what sort of ratings they get, but they've been All Traffic for at least a couple decades. I've never heard CHQT, though. A local 50KW station on 880, KIXI, is in the way.
The fact that Corus is deciding to eliminate these two large stations in two of Canada's major metros is telling. For one, it is an indicator of the state of radio today, where advertising revenues are probably 60% less than they were in 2005, and listenership -- even to highly rated FM stations -- is dropping year by year.
And running a News station, News - Talk station, or All Traffic station is NOT cheap.
For the next few months Corus will continue to keep the stations on the air -- CKGO will be a simulcast of Vancouver's popular News-Talker CKNW 980 (which comes in well into the Seattle area), and CHQT will simulcast CHED 630 (which I also hear most nights fairly clearly).
Then Corus will pull the plug on CKGO and CHQT. If they can't sell the stations, the stations will become permanently silent.
CKGO has a fairly long history in Vancouver, B.C. Back in the 1960's and 70's it was the pop and rock station CKLG, playing Top 40. And being that CanCon (the Canadian content rule for Radio) hit in the 1970's, you could hear bands on CKLG you wouldn't hear on US Top 40 stations, as well as Canadian hits that never made it big south of the 49th Parallel. There were hits by the Stampeders and Guess Who that were played on CKLG that never got played on the Seattle stations, for example.
But around the turn of the Century CKLG had morphed into an All Traffic station. When I got back into MW DXing in 2011 that's when I noticed that CKLG was now All Traffic. It was hard to listen to it for longer than maybe 4-5 minutes. It also had new call letters, which were non-memorable (CHMJ).
Now CKGO will be a carbon copy of CKNW before they pull the plug. It is possible they may sell the station. The market, however, for AM stations in Canada is not robust. AM 730 does have good coverage of the Vancouver, B.C. market, so it is possible that another company could buy the station and put a different format on it. Maybe an ethnic format, like Punjabi or Hindi, will fill the bill on CKGO. Time will tell.
CHQT 880 Edmonton's previous logo, before it started simulcasting CHED 630 last week
The staff, by the time you read this, probably will already have been laid off. Radio in general, is an industry in contraction. One could also say it's in decline. I hate that, of course, because I always wanted to work in radio when I was a kid, and I ended up being able to work in the field for nearly 20 years.
But the tastes of music and audio entertainment consumers is changing, and it's not just the internet -- even the internet is changing. Websites shut down; eGroups disappear, and what's left of them have no activity; newspaper websites make a go of it and then close -- the internet and the online world is in a constant state of flux, and Radio is just one of the industries that's taking a massive hit from those constant changes.
Here is a Canadian news article on the changes at CKGO and CHQT.:
In other Radio news, local Alternative Rock AM station KGRG-1 is off the air, due to a transmitter malfunction. KGRG-1 is an AM college radio station in Enumclaw, WA, maybe 25 miles / 30 km South of me. KGRG-1 run at low power, about 500 Watts days, and 26 Watts at night. During the day I can usually hear them weakly, but readably, especially on my Superadios or Sangean PR-D5.
KGRG-1 used to play a lot of Grunge era, Classic Alternative music. Then they changed formats about six months or so ago, to newer Alternative, which wasn't bad, although I really liked the Classic Alternative from the 1990's and 2000's. Now they are temporarily silent.
Their engineer said online that KGRG-1 plan to return to the air by September. The number of listeners KGRG-1 has is a good question. They might have had the potential to draw an audience, as they used to play a significant amount of Grunge music, and Seattle is the home of Grunge. But their signal is limited to South King County, and there is the issue of the station being on AM.
KGRG-FM 89.9 plays more modern alternative, but their signals don't reach quite as far as the AM station does. They are in HD, though. Right now they may have a problem with the location of their transmitter, so their future is in flux.
I wish them well. Radio is a tough sell to college students these days. According to some educators in the field, the students are more interested in podcasting. The problem with that, is that you don't need to go to college to learn to podcast. Any day I can peruse hundreds of channels on YT and see podcasters who didn't get their skills in college. Many of them just have a Smartphone and an internet connection. They talk into their phone's camera, and... Voila!... Podcast!
College Radio programs and newspaper programs aren't just seeing declining importance in the eyes of students, but colleges in general are starting to see falling enrollments as the GenZ'ers are a smaller population than the Millennials before them.
So I suppose the question is: who will be on the Radio airwaves in 30 years? Will anyone? And who will be staffing newspapers (a definitely declining field, numbers wise)? Will radio and newspaper programs really be necessary if those fields are continuing to decline?
Time will tell.
RE: KITI 1420 Centralia, WA -- Classic Hits & Oldies; & KUJ Walla Walla
Being that I finally figured out how to get one
on Blogger without it sounding completely tinny, or it being cut off as being
too long. This is my Sangean PR-D4W playing 1420
KITI, Centralia, Washington, playing some oldies. Local station KRIZ,
Renton, is off the air because of transmitter issues (as I mentioned in my last
blog article).
In the second vid clip, you can hear the talk show on KUJ, Walla Walla, on the other side of the state.
I had the PR-D4W set to 2.5 kHz bandwidth here in both of these clips. 4 kHz sounded a little trebly, and 2.5 kHz is a good compromise, especially using the speaker. With 4 kHz, you hear the bass more -- but that's through the headphones, not so much the speaker. And being that my phone's mic isn't particularly high fidelity, I went with the compromise
When DXing with this radio, I always use headphones, and start out with 2.5 kHz bandwidth, and then widen or narrow it to taste, depending on the strength of the signal, adjacent channel interference, and other factors.
KITI 1420, Centralia-Chehalis, WA. Around 1:30 a.m. KUJ, Walla Walla, WA is the faint talk station in back.
This vid clip has more KUJ Walla Walla talk in it. It was kind of fun to record these. I haven't done much recording of radio catches -- not like a lot of other DXers do. One issue is the tinniness of the sound that the phone sometimes produces. Another is just me getting used to the technique of recording a short clip and posting it.
I have a PR-D4W article in the works. I'll probably post it in a few weeks.
Until next installment, my friends and readers,
Peace.
C.C. July 13th, 2024.
Edited on July 14th, 2024.
- - - - - - - - -
July 14th: The following I just Edited out, & replaced. It was the bottom paragraphs of the article. For some reason, at the time I was not able to upload a couple short vid clips. It turns out that the videos wouldn't load because I hit the wrong 'insert' button. My bad.:
I was going to close this article with a couple short vid clips. As you may be aware, I was able to upload a ten second video clip yesterday, of my Realistic SW-60 playing China's National Broadcaster CNR-1. I thought I'd upload a clip of my PR-D4W playing KITI Centralia, being that some MW DXers out there might like to see what it sounds like, but for some reason this website doesn't seem to support MP4's anymore. I can't even reload the MP4 vid clip I posted on my last article yesterday, the one with CNR-1 playing. Even after following all directions to a T. Very odd.
This is what happens when you're a bit frazzled and keep hitting the "photo" insert button instead of the "video" insert button. Sorry Blogger. It was my mistake, not yours.
I also added some location information here and there that I had inadvertently left out.
I also had to straighten out some formatting on July 16th.
Peace.
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