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Subject: LARP - Michael Sheehy: Radio Veteran Adapting to Changes
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 18:12:29 -0700

 

Michael Sheehy: Radio Veteran Adapting to Changes

Producer Goes Online For His Latest Endeavor 

By Mark Madler, San Fernando Valley Business Journal Staff

Michael Sheehy has spent a nearly 40-year career in radio yet does not listen to radio himself.

The 57-year-old has no interest in talk radio and the scope of his musical tastes cannot be met by what comes out of a car radio.

“They can’t keep up with me,” Sheehy said. “I don’t blame them. You can’t be everything to everyone.”

Now a freelance producer, Sheehy worked at KNX-FM as an on-air personality, music director and program director and spent 12 years at KTWV The Wave as an on-air personality and creative/production director.

He still counts 15 radio stations across the country as clients for his voiceover work, and can be heard on local stations in commercials for Sport Chalet.

In April, Sheehy and a group of talented friends debuted Planet Pootwaddle, an online radio station with a playlist all over the musical map.

Broadcasting from a converted stable in the backyard of Sheehy’s Burbank home, Planet Pootwaddle plays everything from Frank Sinatra to Stevie Ray Vaughn to the comedy bits from Monty Python and The Firesign Theatre. The creative team includes radio and TV veteran Gary Owens, voice actors Wally Wingert and Mona Marshall, and Dave Hall, of “CSI.”

Sheehy borrowed the term “pootwaddle” from the Spike Jones radio show of the late 1940s. In polite terms, it means to pass gas.

“There is a certain zaniness and craziness that goes along with Spike Jones,” Sheehy said. “It’s the essence of that energy we try to put into what we are doing.”

Q: What’s been your background in the radio business?

A: When I started in radio it was in 1968. Free-form radio was the thing; there was no format. If there is anything on the programming side of radio I’ve done it. Maybe not well, like being a newscaster I’m awful at it. I’ve been a program director, I’ve been a disc jockey, and I’ve been a transmitter babysitter. A lot of the people in broadcasting today don’t have the benefit of that experience because that experience doesn’t exist today.

Q: Why do you think that is?

A: The technology and everything else has changed. In the old days you used to have a first class FCC license. It was a totally different deal. I’ve been in the Wild West of radio and for the people out there now it is a totally different feel.

Q: Is that because of the corporations?

A: Somebody who has been there a long time and have had a successful following but are making too much money – whoop! A bean counter doesn’t give credit for the people who have been listening to you for 30 years. All they are looking at is the bottom line. The bean counter mentality has altered the way things go about.

Q: Do you think it takes away from the creativity of the on-air personalities?

A: Absolutely. It sucked the soul right out. One old radio adage is ‘Never ask permission; ask forgiveness.’ When you’re a morning guy you never want to ask, ‘Would it be okay if I did…’ because you know the answer is going to be no. So you do it. (Fired morning radio talk show host) Don Imus – he was hired to do what he does. He’s got millions of listeners. But when he does what he does he gets in trouble and the company jumps on him. That doesn’t make any sense. They were paying him to do what he does.

Q: Is Internet radio how radio was when you first started?

A: No because a lot of the Internet people are normal civilian people who don’t have a radio background. They probably have a lot of talent, they don’t have the radio mindset which could be a good thing or a bad thing. We basically have a troupe of people who like to come together and have fun. Normally they are doing serious stuff. It’s a place for our people to kick their shoes off and have fun. You can’t get this thing on terrestrial radio.

Q: Give your take on the royalty rate issue for Internet radio stations.

A: It’s a tussle between the have and have nots; corporate entities versus the little guy. I think the guys trying to charge these royalties are going to go after the big guys too and I think the big guys realize that. I am just waiting out the storm. The funny thing is there are ways to get around the royalty issue. People can start broadcasting right out of Sweden, which a lot of them are going to do. I have no problem with everyone getting their fair share. It’s their work; of course they should get a taste. I have no problem paying it. What’s going is more political than anything else. It’s a matter of control.

 

Valley Home to Hot Radio Companies

 

The Sound of a Billion Dollars

 By Mark Madler, San Fernando Valley Business Journal Staff

The Piolon por la Manana radio show has been over for two hours and host Eddie Sotelo and crew remain working in the KSCA studio.

Sotelo still shows a lot of energy even after hosting a 7-hour show syndicated to more than 30 markets, never standing still before a microphone on which he places a small toy bobblehead dog.

“This is for Friday,” Sotelo calls out as he prepares to record a television promo for an upcoming show. “Quatro, tres, dos, uno…”

Sotelo – nicknamed Piolin which translates into “Tweety Bird” in Spanish – and the morning show crew broadcast from a new studio on the top floor of a 25-story building in Glendale, an appropriate place considering they have the top rated show on the top rated station in all of Los Angeles.

For the local market Glendale and Burbank are the center of the radio universe, hosting multiple stations owned by the largest media companies with a variety of formats.

The most recent Arbitron ratings data released in July show that 7 of the top 10 stations in the Los Angeles/Orange County market are based in those two cities.

As for advertising revenue, the Los Angeles market is the radio industry’s billion dollar baby – the only one in the country pulling in that amount. Lengthy commute times are cited by industry experts as the reason why advertisers are attracted to radio.

The market is described as competitive and fragmented; a heavy lure for top on-air talent and executives; one in which one station promotes the traditional concert ticket giveaway and another promotes how to gain U.S. citizenship.

“A lot of new things come out of here and what is done is generally done very well,” said Mary Beth Garber, president of the Southern California Broadcasters Association.

The power still residing in radio comes back to Sotelo whose profile was raised certainly in the English-speaking media after his call for immigration reform led to a march by a half million Angelenos in May 2006.

A jokester in the studio, Sotelo turns serious afterward to explain his appeal to the audience is they can identify with what goes on in his life.

“People feel I am one of their family members,” Sotelo said.

The top companies

Four of the top rated stations are owned by Clear Channel – pop station KIIS-FM and news talk giant KFI-AM – and Univision – KSCA and KLVE-FM. The Walt Disney Co., Emmis Communications, Liberman Communications and Camarillo-based Salem Communications round out the large media corporations with stations operating out of Burbank or Glendale. (Attempts to reach a representative of Clear Channel and Liberman for this story were unsuccessful.)

That wasn’t always the case.

A change in the business licensing process in the city of Los Angeles led to broadcasters skipping the border into what was considered a more business-friendly locale. This happened at a time of consolidation in the industry leading to modernizing of facilities and putting multiple stations under one roof, said George Nadel Rivin, an accountant with Miller Kaplan & Arase in North Hollywood who works with the broadcast industry.

Clear Channel, for example, took stations in four different areas and put them in the Pinnacle building in Burbank’s Media District in a deal worth $45 million.

Concept of clustering

Clustering commonly owned stations has been positive for the market in that it puts everything at hand for the executives in charge.

“All the stations can be equally looked at,” Rivin said. “From the shared personnel and shared production facilities there are some economies of scale.”

Listeners in the Los Angeles market can find whatever radio format they want in dozens of different languages – all music, all talk, news, and sports. Lotus Communications operates an Iranian station out of the Valley.

“They looked where the signal was and it blanketed where the Persian community lived,” Garber said.

Clear Channel has a lock on music and talk in both AM and FM, while Univision and Liberman operate Spanish language stations. Salem’s local affiliates including music station KFSH and talk station KRLA reflect the company’s Christian and conservative views. Disney, of course, has Radio Disney on the AM dial targeted at pre-teens and young teens and their parents who chauffeur them.

With so much at stake in terms of ad dollars – every tenth of a point in ratings is the equal to $1.25 million per year in revenue, according to Garber – L.A. radio stations do what they must to draw in listeners – copy from competitors, hire big name talent, switch formats.

“We take every tenth of a point very seriously,” said Jimmy Steal, vice president of programming for Emmis, owner of KMVN (Movin’ 93) and KPWR (Power 106).

Newspaper readership and television viewing may have dropped in recent years but radio is the one medium that holds steady with listener numbers.

What industry watchers find in the LA/OC market is that long commute times create a captive audience for advertisers. The average person in the market spends 1 hour and 40 minutes listening to radio in their car.

‘IPod fatigue’

What is called “iPod fatigue” drives listeners to switching on the car radio again after they tire of the hundreds or thousands of songs downloaded into the ubiquitous portable music device.

“They look for fresh material and information and come back to radio,” said Dave Newmark, head of Bid4Spots, an Encino-based online auction site for unused radio ad time.

Starting next year, Arbitron unveils the personal people meter, an electronic method of gathering listening patterns to determine ratings. The PPM is a beeper-sized device that picks up an encoded signal to tell what stations a person wearing it is listening to.

The meter will “revolutionize” the industry, Steal said, because it eliminates the seven-day diary tracking listening habits and won’t be dependent on listener recall.

The device may even go so far as to reduce or do away with the liners and promos that repeat a stations call letters because an Arbitron listener won’t have to remember them to write in the diary, Garber said.

“It won’t change what the medium does or what makes it unique but it will change the listening experience, which makes it more fun,” Garber said.

 

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