WWNO Moves to HD

Another sad day in radio as WWNO in New Orleans moves off the FM main channel and onto HD today.  We reported on this earlier but had the date wrong.  A note to the listserve from the last man standing, Farrar Hudkins:

…today is the last day of daytime classical music on WWNO in New Orleans. Beginning Monday, daytime classical programming will move to WWNO2, our second HD channel, where, as of right now, I am the only announcer. Also, my show, although expanded to six hour from the current five, will no longer be live, but instead recorded in advance. Not sure if anyone is keeping a list of which stations have changed format, but you may as well add ours to the list Best regards…

Robert Conrad of WCLV says the falling of the dominoes is a talking point in Cleveland.

As WCLV celebrates its 50th anniversary, we are running a series of station breaks naming the cities where there is no main channel classical music station, i.e. Orlando, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Milwaukee, pointing out that this won’t happen in Cleveland.

But have heart, my friends.  The pendulum seems to be swinging back.  The failure of Merlin Media’s  all-news stations in Chicago and NY, reported Wednesday on Radio-info.com is signaling a saturation of the market by news/talk:

Merlin Media tries new tricks, in New York and Chicago.

Yesterday’s staff meetings contained the most drastic news possible – both all-news formats are gone, immediately, replaced by music formats that should be easier to sell and develop more quickly in the ratings… one old programming truth has been validated yet again – content matters. Just putting a new product on FM and expecting it to beat an established AM won’t cut it. This wasn’t a referendum on whether news works on FM. It can. But Merlin’s expensive one-year experiment shows that all-news is harder than it looks.

Radio blogger Mark Ramsey has some musings on the issue with yet more talk on FM:

Perhaps these markets are just too news-soaked to reward new entrants without enough meaningful and palpable differences, I don’t know. Maybe the existing options were simply good enough. Maybe all the news bellies were already full.  Maybe news consumers who have not already chosen a radio news option have chosen other news options enabled by those fabulously connected devices in their pockets.

None of that means “news doesn’t work on FM.”

It’s silly, silly, silly for stations to keep trying to grab that extra little market share with yet more talkety-talk when they have an absolutely solid, loyal niche audience of classical listeners.  It costs so little to put out a great product in classical music, and a small abount of effort and thoughtful planning can make the station fiscally sound.  Are we so greedy for profit that we have to shut out a valuable segment of the audience for a few extra bucks?  Good grief.