Media

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By ANNE BURKE

Contributing Reporter

L.A.’s car culture makes this the top radio market in the country beating even New York, the nation’s biggest city in population.

This year, radio listenership is up and advertising revenues are on pace to hit a record-breaking $600 million, which would be about 11 percent more than last year, said George Nadel Rivin of Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Co., a North Hollywood accounting firm that analyzes 104 radio markets across the country.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles newspaper industry while profitable, especially in today’s robust economy is not nearly as vibrant as radio.

The dominant Los Angeles Times is only slowly emerging from its circulation slump. One established community daily, the Santa Monica Outlook, shut its doors for good earlier this year.

And the Long Beach Press-Telegram and Daily News of Los Angeles were bought by Dean Singleton, the Denver-based media mogul who is trying to gain efficiencies by uniting some of the assets of his other L.A.-area papers.

In terms of gaining efficiencies, L.A.’s radio industry is far ahead of newspapers.

Indeed, much of radio’s success in Los Angeles is attributable to the “clustering” of stations. Several years ago, CBS Radio offered advertisers two choices: all-news KNX-AM or the oldies-formatted KCBS-FM. Today, with eight L.A.-area stations, CBS can position spots from one end of the dial to the other. Such clustering allows stations to attract national advertisers and charge more for airtime.

Radio programmers in Los Angeles also have been particularly shrewd in identifying niche audiences and tailoring programming to suit their tastes, said Kraig Kitchin, chief operating officer of Premiere Radio Networks Inc., a radio program syndicator whose stable includes Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Rush Limbaugh.

The niche programming strategy is not limited to English-speaking audiences, either. “The same is true for Hispanic listeners and Asian audiences,” Kitchin said. “There is more (for radio) to offer than any newspaper can.”

The 5,000-square-mile Los Angeles marketing area is home to 84 radio stations, 43 of which have audiences big enough to be rated by the Arbitron Co.

By comparison, L.A. has only 13 daily newspapers whose circulation figures are audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, and readership for those has remained virtually unchanged at about 2 million since 1994.

One Los Angeles newspaper executive said one of the reasons why radio has been in the fast lane is the intense competition among local stations. “Competition breeds innovations, daring, the unusual,” he said. “Newspapers are far tamer and less interesting than they used to be.”

To understand L.A.’s love affair with the radio, it is important to understand the way in which the city became the sprawling metropolis that it is today, says Jeff Williams, research director at KSCA-FM, Los Angeles’ top-rated station among listeners 12 and older.

“Cities back East Boston, New York, Philadelphia grew up vertically and close together. Los Angeles grew up horizontally. One of the reasons is that we have things that make buildings fall down here. Another is that Los Angeles basically grew up after the invention of the automobile, so we had no geographic boundaries to how far out we could go. Those things dictated that Los Angeles would grow out and not up,” Williams said.

Consider these numbers about L.A.’s radio market:

? There are more than 6 million automobiles in metropolitan Los Angeles, according to the Southern California Broadcasters Association more than the total number of vehicles in all but five countries in the world (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Canada).

? The average commute time between home and work is about 35 minutes each way, providing advertisers with plenty of time to get their message across.

? About 85 percent of motorists in the Los Angeles market listen to the radio while driving, said Lynn Christian, who heads the Radio Advertising Bureau’s Los Angeles office.

? Nearly 2.9 million automobiles are on L.A.’s 650 miles of freeways and 22,000 miles of surface streets between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on the average weekday. Even on Sunday mornings, there are more than 2 million cars on the roads. That’s about the equivalent of the population of Nashville.

? At 8 p.m. on the average weekday night, one out of four households in the market still has a vehicle on the road, Williams said.

Yet even when motorists are comfortably ensconced back at home, they’re usually not reading a newspaper. For news, most turn to television, where reports are more up to date than those in the morning newspaper. And there has been no evening newspaper in Los Angeles since the Los Angeles Herald Examiner folded about a decade ago.

Even Los Angeles Times Publisher Mark Willes conceded that media statistics paint a “scary” picture about the role of newspapers in the lives of Angelenos.

Market penetration for the Times is only 28 percent, substantially below that of major papers in other U.S. metro areas, Willes said in a recent speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

John Morton, a newpaper analyst for Morton Research, pointed out that Willis’ 28 percent penetration figure only refers to the paper’s core areas. “It falls down to 20 percent in outlying areas,” he said.

In the Latino market the fastest-growing segment of L.A.’s population the Times penetration is only 19 percent. Meanwhile, No. 1-rated L.A. radio station KSCA-FM and No. 2-rated KLVE-FM are both Spanish-language stations.

While the listenership of these and other L.A. radio stations has climbed steadily in recent years, the Times’ daily circulation is 1.1 million, down from a peak of 1.3 million in 1991. (Willis has vowed he will boost daily circulation to 1.5 million.)

Even more threatening is the fragility of the paper’s circulation base. More than 700,000 subscriptions are stopped each year. The resulting “churn” is significantly higher than the average for major papers nationwide, Willes said.

But the news is not all bad for newspapers.

During the six-month period ended March 31, the Times’ daily circulation increased by 26,195, or 2.5 percent. Revenues are also up 2.2 percent for the first five months of 1998 and 6.1 percent for the month of May.

When the Outlook folded, a small, local weekly, the Santa Monica Sun, sprang up almost immediately to fill the niche, and the Los Angeles Times also weighed in with a weekly section. Those developments reflect the importance of community news in the lives of readers, experts say, and, in the case of the Times, an example of how swift a giant media company can move to fill a void in a local, affluent area.

“Increasingly, people are looking to small community newspapers. They’re very local in terms of advertising, and they focus on good things happening in the community next week’s fair, recent weddings, a Chamber of Commerce function,” said Cynthia Rawitch, a journalism professor at Cal State Northridge.

Morton said the future for newspapers in the Los Angeles market may be even brighter. “The Southern California economy has been a drag for a long time,” he said, “but it has been picking up.”

Moreover, he said, newspapers remain a stable business and are not as vulnerable to the quixotic waverings of radio audiences. “Radio is not as steady in its performance,” he said.

Morton said one of the reasons advertisers remain fond of newspapers is the characteristics of their readership. “It’s paid circulation,” he said. “It’s not some audience measurement. Papers are actually sold and advertisers believe that if someone pays for it, they will read it.”

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