When the owners of AM radio stations started feeling the competitive heat from FM stations more than two decades ago, one of the first places they swung the cost-cutting ax was in newsrooms. That led to the near demise of radio news, which has slid from public service to almost oddity status.
Now the industry’s cutting is continuing at four CBS stations in Chicago and an unspecified number of other markets as stations have decided not to renew their wire service contract with The Associated Press, the world’s largest news-gathering operation. AP raised its rates and the stations decided the cost was too high.
In Chicago, WUSN-FM, WJMK-FM, WXRT-FM and WSCR-AM dropped the AP wire, according to a spokesman for AP’s broadcast operation in Washington, D.C. WBBM-AM, the city’s only all-news station, will keep the AP service.
Chris Ender, a spokesman for CBS in Los Angeles, said the decision to drop the service “is not a corporate decision, but one made by individual stations.”
Peace at last? Detroit’s two major newspapers gave big front-page play Wednesday to the news that the United Auto Workers union has ended the boycott it launched against them 5 1/2 years ago.
The boycott stemmed from a strike by six newspaper union locals against the two papers, which led to a 30 percent drop in combined circulation at the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News.
Executives at both papers are hopeful that the decision by the region’s largest union will heal the wounds left by the strike and enable the papers to recover some of the 300,000 in lost circulation. The last of the striking unions ratified a contract in December, and both papers were anticipating the gesture from the UAW.
“Old wounds won’t heal overnight,” said a Free Press editorial, “but with this last scar salved, the newspapers’ vital mission can be invigorated.”
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Taking stock: Granite Broadcasting Corp., which owns nine television stations in markets such as San Francisco, Detroit, Buffalo and Peoria, has seen its stock fall like a wounded dot-com. And next month the company will have to explain its swoon to Nasdaq, which has kept the stock on the exchange despite its drop.
Nasdaq requires that a stock trade at a minimum of $5 per share to maintain its status on the exchange, but Granite hasn’t seen that level since September. The softening ad climate contributed to the drop in Granite’s stock, which a year ago this month was trading at $13 a share. By year-end, it had tumbled to 81 cents and has traded around $3 for most of this month.
New economy stocks have been falling off the Nasdaq like leaves in the fall, but Granite’s predicament is conspicuous because it represents the old and generally solid business of television. “This will be a defining moment for Granite. It has a lot of explaining to do,” said Bishop Cheen, an analyst who follows the company for First Union Capital Markets.
Not working here: Readers of the Tribune’s Working section may have noticed an ad on the back of the section Wednesday promoting sports columnist Bernie Lincicome, who left the paper in August.
No, he’s not back.
A spokesman for the Tribune notes that the paper runs a number of promotional ads and that this one “just slipped through the cracks.”
And on the cover . . . of next month’s issue of Working Woman magazine: George W. Bush. The issue marks the first time a man has appeared on the cover of the 628,000-circulation magazine in five years. The last one? Bill Gates.