For Whitney Media owner William O’Shaughnessy, a legendary figure in New York broadcasting, succeeding as a true community connector all boils down to one key goal.
It also comes down to gaining influence with local leaders — an important ingredient for making a radio station truly valuable to the listeners it serves.
If not for these values O’Shaughnessy holds so tight, a radio station — perhaps your own — could just be another jukebox or entertainment purveyor.
That’s not a recipe for longevity, O’Shaughnessy says in this exclusive RBR+TVBR INFOCUS report.
Since 1959, Whitney Media has served as a hyper-local voice in the “backyard” of the nation’s biggest city, New York.
Today, WVOX-AM 1460, a non-directional, two-pattern facility with 500 watts during daylight hours and 122 watts at night, reaches the portion of Westchester County south of Interstate 287, all of the Bronx, and much of Queens and the North Shore of Nassau County.
There’s also the former WVOX-FM, now WVIP-FM 93.5 — its sibling “where many different voices are heard.” WVIP was, in the 1980s, a local AC serving Rockland County, N.Y., at 106.3 MHz. Today, it uses a Class A signal to cover a wide swath of the New York Tri-State Area.
For WVOX and WVIP, coverage outside of Westchester County is a bonus. These are stations that serve Purchase, and Rye, and New Rochelle, and Mt. Vernon. It’s also all about Mamaroneck, Harrison, and Scarsdale.
Taking this hometown approach is, when chatting with O’Shaughnessy, much like taking a trip back in time, perhaps to 1976, when Talk Radio was powered by local callers.
Is that a lost art of the AM band, and even for FM stations? Is radio the forgotten medium that can best connect to the community?
“You led with an essential question,” O’Shaughnessy says. “Radio is still the medium closest to the people, even in this high-tech, electronic, ‘Star Wars’ day and age, where everything seems to be crumbling.”
Why? Because it’s free, and, in O’Shaughnessy’s words, is the medium “of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the misunderstood.” He explains, “Radio requires no cable bill, nor does it require an expensive instrument to purchase at an Apple Store. You can buy a pocket radio for $10 … and it works. It’s accessible, and it’s everywhere apparent.”
O’Shaughnessy is a reverent Irish Catholic, and likens radio to biblical character Lazarus — “You can’t kill it.” It’s why it’s withstood everything from the advent of television to the wireless accessibility of the internet.
But, he is careful to say radio can’t be killed “if you do it right.”
What does his mean by that? O’Shaughnessy’s mind was jogged as he recalled a radio station owner in the Houston suburbs who “was getting killed.” The owner noted his troubles on a Facebook post, lamenting how his Sports stations were troubled assets. O’Shaughnessy chimed in by suggesting he go local, and let the people it sought to serve steer the teetering ship.
“A radio station achieves its highest calling when it reaches a platform of many different viewpoints,” O’Shaughnessy says. “It has to be more than a jukebox, or a purveyor of entertainment.”
That’s one reason why O’Shaughnessy signs when he sees most of his colleagues still trying to find the right musical format to “save them, and sustain them.”
O’Shaughnessy is still an admirer of the late New York State Governor Mario Cuomo; he’s written multiple tomes on the great orator. He quoted Cuomo, who once said to him, “A radio station can build up a community, and even make it sweeter than it is, by being that platform of viewpoints.”
A HOME FOR DIALOGUE
For O’Shaughnessy, music can be found everywhere, from YouTube to Pandora, to Spotify to Sirius XM. “I don’t want to put that on a local radio station,” he asserts. “Let dialogue be what you’re peddling. What I can do is amplify the voices in the community.”
That’s not an easy task. O’Shaughnessy is fully aware of that, noting that some stations “have become beholden to absentee owners.”
Yet, some stations are taking on the challenge. Some 90 miles to the north, Townsquare Media is selling WKNY-AM 1490 in Kingston, N.Y., to a non-profit group that will keep the station’s local focus while expanding on this mission.
In Buffalo, WECK-AM 1230 recently relaunched as “Buffalo’s Very Own,” taking a Full Service approach with an FM translator boosting its accessibility in the Western New York metropolis.
Talent and personalities are mentioned to O’Shaughnessy. This led him to provide a unique counterpoint to the theory that these are quintessential ingredients to a radio station’s ultimate success. “To me, the great talent resides with the people — the community voices.”
The cost of building a locally focused radio station is brought up. He scoffs, “I disagree that it is an expensive format to run. In every community, there are people who have something to say. That is the real music of America, right in the street. It is the music of the neighborhoods.”
THE GREAT REFLECTOR
Not just “a Tom-Tom” sending signals from one point to another, O’Shaughnessy likens radio to a reflector. He starts with people he affectionately called “The Townies.”
O’Shaughnessy points to Nassau and Suffolk Counties. He says, “Every year somebody tries to build up a station, and then nothing happens. They don’t realize that it is not Alec Baldwin, or Martha Stewart, or Chuck Scarborough that controls Long Island. It is the Italian businessman in the community.”
By appealing to this listener, a station can “editorialize, endorse a candidate, and raise hell,” he says. This can lead the “town elders” into being convinced they “have to deal with this guy.”
It’s a recipe O’Shaughnessy believes can work in the Houston suburbs, in Albuquerque and in communities great and small across the U.S.
He is again asked the question of how the station owner can make money by taking this approach.
“You’re going to say who listens to your radio station,” O’Shaughnessy explains. “Get a sales manager who understand that.”
It’s all about influence, he argues.
Can influence serve as a strong replacement for a world in which PPM results drive media buying and planning, even as local advertisers turn to YouTube, Google, Facebook and Instagram to help build sales?
Perhaps we’ve reached that point. With racial tensions at a boiling point and the events of last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., a hot topic in communities across the U.S., perhaps this Rockefeller Republican has a brilliant idea that’s all but forgotten at Talk Radio: Yield the microphone to the caller.
The cacophony of ideas could be a perfect recipe, or antidote, to the poison that has led America to experience a level of strain and pain unseen since the 1970s.
O’Shaughnessy recalls some of the callers he’s given air time to, begrudgingly. “I’d have to sit listening to my station defending abortion, and I’ve had Mario Cuomo defending the death penalty,” he says. “I’m an admirer and casual friend of President Trump. But, we let everybody get on the air. David Hinckley, the former New York Daily News writer now at Politico, called WVOX ‘a glorious hodgepodge of community programming.'”
For some flailing AMs in communities where a voice is lacking, or a platform for voices has been forgotten, perhaps O’Shaughnessy’s ideas are more timely than ever.
If there’s lingering doubt, perhaps O’Shaughnessy’s closing comments about some of the legends of the New York radio airwaves can convince an owner or two.
“How can one survive, and prevail? Look at Scott Shannon. He makes people think. And, in his best moments, he is a social commentator.”
Yet, Shannon is the No. 1-rated morning host in the No. 1 Nielsen Audio market in the U.S., again. It’s a feat first gained in late 1983.
As O’Shaughnessy defended Don Imus and Howard Stern and their free speech rights, a terrorist attack unfolded in Barcelona, Spain.
Given the events at home and around the world, the call for a community forum of the airwaves seemed appropriate, and necessary.
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