Media: Now Santos Too?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - It isn't pretty to watch the decline of a once-great radio station. Now, as a follow-up to the earlier story that it would no longer be live and local all day and all night, WBZ 1030 AM in Boston has quietly announced that morning sports reporter Gil Santos will be retiring and will be not be replaced.

The move leaves WBZ, supposedly a news station in one of the most sports-crazy areas of the United States and flagship station for the Boston Bruins National Hockey League team, without any sports reporters at all on weekdays. Previously, Alan Segel and Tom Cuddy had been involuntarily removed from the schedule. Presumably, this means that in a month, news anchor Ed Walsh will be reading sports news at :15 and :45 after the hour in the morning, much as Diane Stern is currently reading sports in the afternoon.

As always, the best coverage of this change has come from Scott Fybush's NorthEast Radio Watch, a premier resource for broadcasting information in the region. In the October 12th edition of NorthEast Radio Watch, Fybush not only thoroughly covers the story, but offers substantial commentary on all the changes at WBZ, including the following:

The trust listeners have placed in WBZ for generations may not be as easy to quantify on the books as, say, the stick value of a clear channel at 1030 on the dial or the real estate adjoining the Harvard campus. But whatever value that trust once had - and whatever investment in the "WBZ Radio" brand could have been transferred from an aging AM facility to newer media - is instead being rapidly eroded.

Fybush has highlighted the most important point. This week on CBC's radio's Age of Persuasion, host Terry O'Reilly pointed out several examples of companies that spent money developing their brands during times of recession or other stresses like a war, and how those firms reaped significant benefits afterward. The most amazing story to me was about a company that kept advertising its margarine brand during World War II in Britain even though all sales were generic by law. After the war was over and the restriction was released, that brand completely dominated market share.

In radio, personalities are a big part of building a brand. I used to listen to KIRO every morning when I was growing up in the Seattle area, and I did so mainly because of local hosts Bill Yeend and Dave Stone. Now that Yeend has moved to KOMO and Stone is retired, I haven't found myself tuning in KIRO during morning drive when I visit Seattle.

When I lived in Boston, the chemistry between news anchor Gary LaPierre and Gil Santos made WBZ worth listening to in the morning, and Santos' sports commentaries at about 12:27 during lunch were a fixture of my time in region. LaPierre has retired, but Santos still worked well with Ed Walsh when I listened while visiting the area, and I still preferred that position on my radio dial.

That Santos would retire was inevitable. The mistake that WBZ is making is eliminating his position, rather than letting someone like Cuddy, Segel, or even a fresh talent take on the reporting and commenting position to develop his (or her) own relationship with listeners. By instead eliminating these features, they are weakening their WBZ brand at a time of stress--which Terry O'Reilly teaches us is exactly the time to consolidate brand loyalty.

I suspect the next time I visit Boston, I'll be tuning in public radio WBUR in the morning. For now, at least, they still have a significant news staff and substantial local reporting in the morning--something that is increasingly not true at once-stalwart WBZ.