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Thursday, June 22, 2000
Talking the
talk not easy for
radio stations
Sports talk shows are popular,
By Pat Bigold
as long as the topics are local,
and it's a tough sell in
Hawaii's small market
Star-BulletinWhile it lasted, KGU's "The Ball" all-sports talk show format got the numbers it wanted.
"All-World Sports" with Mike Buck and Russ Francis hit the local topics in a weekday morning drive show while nationally syndicated One on One Sports hosts like Papa Joe Chevalier, Bob Kemp, Peter Brown and Dave Harbison commanded the rest of the day.
When the station let the air out of The Ball at the start of April, the uproar from listeners was audible.
But the reasoning was clear: lack of revenue.
"We proved conclusively that our sports presentation was better than anyone else's," said KGU program director Mike Buck. "We had higher numbers than anyone else's, and we were losing money faster than we could print it."
New KGU owner, Salem Communications of Los Angeles, decided to go to a conservative political talk show format in a presidential election year.
Talk to Me
KCCN-1420 AM: 296-1420.
Sportspage, weekdays, 6 a.m.
KWAI-1080 AM, 524-1080
KAIM-870 AM, 735-2424
"I think the bottom line is that the day after football, the Super Bowl, it's see ya' to revenue," said Buck. "And there's no revenue stream until football starts again. You can't last all year on what you can get in a half year."
KGU carries Los Angeles Dodgers baseball and has exclusive rights to NFL coverage, including doubleheaders every Sunday.
But after Buck pulled John Miro's Monday evening "Talkin' Sports" show, sports talk was no longer part of the formula at the station.
"People whined and groaned at us for a couple of days and I kept telling them don't kill the messenger," said Buck, who replaced the All-World Sports slot by hosting a general topics drive show from 6-10 a.m.
"And now the same people who used to call us for sports, call us for (general) talk. Our audience is now 50-50 women and men and we're having fun. We know the audience base is way bigger now."
There are only three stations left in town that feature sports talk shows: KCCN-1420 AM, KWAI-1080 AM and KAIM-870 AM.
The only other stations in town that feature any kind of talk are KHVH-AM, home of the popular Rick Hamada show, and KHPR-AM.
KCCN owns the University of Hawaii sports contract and program director Keaumiki Akui believes it's what keeps his three sports talk shows afloat.
The station features Bobby Curran's "Sportspage" weekday mornings at 6, while "Hawaii Sports Talk" with Barry Villamil airs Mondays at 7:30 p.m. and "Hawaii Sports Reporters" with Jeff Portnoy is on Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m.
KCCN has more local sports talk than any station in town. But Akui admits that when the university's sports season ends, Curran's show must get creative to keep its listeners."As soon as the sports programs are over, we really have to plan ahead to keep the sports fan tuned in," he said. "That's why we create different kinds of promotional gimmicks to keep the fans listening.
"We have Bobby Curran's ultimate trivia contest which runs for the entire summer and it generates a lot of listeners because it is a competitive thing and people can get involved in it."
Akui said an extended contract with UH makes it reasonable for KCCN to explore even more sports talk possibilities.
"We have Westwood One, NBC and ABC sports, we have Fischer Entertainment," he said. "We have so many nationally syndicated programs courting us now. I have the entire One on One syndicated program on my desk, in cassette form.
"We're going to make our station THE sports station."
It's likely that KCCN will soon go with the One on One Sports programs that were sorely missed when KGU - literally - dropped The Ball.
But Akui and Don Robbs, who will become KCCN's consultant for UH sports next month, agree on one thing.
"Local works, national doesn't," said Robbs. "One on One may have some interesting shows and they touch on national issues, but people want to talk about local stuff here. They want to talk about Les Murakami and Riley Wallace and Rainbow football, and St. Louis football, and that sort of thing.
"People don't really care that much about the NBA out here."
Akui said he thinks another reason why KCCN can make a better go of a sports talk format is that the station has a better sales staff and a stronger promotions department.
"This is too small a market to support a sports talk format and make it profitable without the UH package," said Robbs. "Certainly KGU gave it a good shot, but there just isn't a good audience out there.
"It's a 25-54 male audience out there, primarily. It's a testosterone-driven format, so you're already limiting the type of advertisers who might be interested. If you can't develop a reasonable listener base, no advertiser will be interested."
Robbs said San Francisco's KNBR has a 50,000-watt signal in the sixth biggest broadcast market in the country.
"They have a potential audience of millions," he said.
"If they get a small share of that, they still have a significant piece of the action, enough to make money."
Talk has never worked
But Robbs put the issue bluntly in perspective."Talk has never worked in this town," said Robbs. "I have been here for a long time and talk radio in any form, whether it's sports talk or talk talk, just has never worked."
Bob Hogue, former sports anchor at KHON who does a daily all-topics show on KCCN, said he thinks Hawaii's culture is a factor.
"Certainly the audience here is much different from the audience on the mainland," said Hogue. "The biggest difference is participation and I think that's a cultural difference. That isn't to say that they're not listening here, but culturally they don't want to respond. People here are just not as aggressive or assertive. In fact they are turned off by assertive, aggressive people.
"Talk show hosts here have to be 'nicer' than they do on the mainland."
Hogue said he tries to find the "hot-button" topic every day, blending sports, politics and other subjects into his format.
"The simpler the issue the more likely they're going to respond," said Hogue. "When it comes to sports, we'll get a lot of response to Bobby Knight. We talked about the St. Louis controversy and that went on for days. We talked about the Punahou-Iolani incident. We talked about the Riley Wallace controversy."
Sports trivia popular
But Hogue endorsed Curran's summer-time formula for generating interest with contests."The biggest numbers come from things like sports trivia," he said. "People love to get on there and play little games."
Curran said he's aware of the shyness factor on hot-button issues.
"I think there's more of a cultural reticence to step up and be heard," said Curran.
Hogue, who taught here, and Curran, who was a student here, both said that they noticed lack of student participation in class in Hawaii.
But they said that they found it didn't mean the students had nothing to say.
"In New York, I assumed the kid didn't know anything," said Curran.
"But here when the teacher forced him to contribute, you found the kid knew everything."
Curran said that once a caller breaks the ice on his show, he or she is more inclined to keep calling back.
"It takes them a while to get up the nerve to break that barrier," he said. "Once they call in and realize they're just chatting with us, they get comfortable."
Regulars mixed blessing
Therefore, Curran's show has "regulars."But Buck said too many "regulars" don't help a talk show.
"The phone calls are important but not if they're from the same person at the same time every day," said Buck.
"New York Al" Smith, who has been in sports talk radio continuously longer than any current host, agreed with Hogue and Curran that it takes a degree of creativity to stimulate intense discussion.
"What I found in Hawaii is that it's really hard to get people to give you an opinion," said Smith, who hosts "Sports Digest" Saturdays at 9 p.m. on KWAI-1080 AM.
"For me, somebody who is really outspoken, coming from New York, it's like pulling teeth sometimes. There's the feeling they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings here, they don't want to rock the boat or say something that they'll have to defend. I was told on many occasions that a show like mine could never make it in Hawaii but I've been on the air longer than anyone else."
Internet making inroads
Some of the radio hosts said they've noticed that fans with very strong opinions tend to take them to Internet message boards like the Rainbow Fan Forum on RainbowSportsNetwork.comThere they can criticize the actions of Riley Wallace or Hugh Yoshida while hiding their identities behind a variety of handles.
Whereas the average sports talk show may average four or five calls an hour on a weekday (Curran said he averages six to seven), the Internet message board gets over 40 comments -- even on a Sunday.
Although it is seasonal, the postgame call-in shows for UH basketball and football are overloaded with callers. Listeners still caught in the emotion of a close game seem to feel more motivated to speak out.
"People were backed up on the lines after the games," said Portnoy. "Our postgame show is supposed to go 20 minutes but they go as long as 45 minutes, with no letup."
Curran said his football postgame show goes 30 minutes.
"But we could take more calls," he said. "One of the things you capture is that audience on the way home, and even the people who are not calling, you know they're listening. And I think in football that audience is particularly large."
But trying to generate talk from a cold start in Honolulu is much harder.
Lack of pro team hurts
The lack of a lively pro sports presence has a lot to do with it, according to all of the radio experts contacted.In Los Angeles, talk show hosts have no problem stirring the cauldron with daily discussion of the Dodgers, Angels, Lakers, Clippers, Kings and to some extent, the WNBA's Spark. Colleges such as UCLA and Southern Cal don't have to carry the show.
In Honolulu, UH is the fulcrum for all sports talk. That's asking a lot of any institution.
Moreover, Hogue said listeners are disinclined to get after topics the way they do on the mainland.
"People will defend the local coach, or the local player more than mainland people would," he said. "If you listen to a mainland show, everybody is ripping Bobby Valentine, or they're ripping a player."
Curran spends a lot of time during his three-hour program on UH issues, tending to defend Rainbow coaches and administrators in controversy.
Local style softer
But, he maintains that his is an independently run show and his range of topics opens the door for even the most bashful listener."Rarely do you find a day when there is not an issue, like John Rocker being sent to Triple A," said Curran.
Portnoy said he's averaging 12 calls on his 90-minute reporters' show.
"The numbers are very good and we have a very good demographic," he said. "It's the quality of the guests."
But Portnoy agrees with the rest of his colleagues that you can't just sit by the phones and expect the floodgates to open.
"You have to rile them up, challenge them," he said.
On one show in February he opened with the question, why do athletes have to thank God for their victories?
It ignited a flurry of calls.
But Portnoy said it's never possible to determine how many are listening by how many are calling.
