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Philly Special: Catching up with Alex Silverman of KYW

KYW recently added an FM simulcast for the first time in its long history. I wanted to talk about that, Alex’s thoughts on the format and how his team handled Wednesday’s shocking events in Washington D.C.

Ryan Maguire

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I recall one afternoon early on in my tenure at KIRO in Seattle, my General Manager at the time called me into his office to introduce me to some partners of the station.

“This is Ryan Maguire, our new Director of News and Programming on KIRO.  People thought we were crazy for hiring him, but we couldn’t find any candidates for the job that were younger than Barbara Bush.”

(The Former First Lady has just died the day before).

My boss’ macabre sense of humor aside, he did have a point.  News-Talk and All-News radio has skewed older in listenership the last few years.  To this day, its one of the biggest challenges for the format.  In some cases, the best way to find younger listeners is with younger leadership.

For quite some time, I’ve wanted to catch up with Alex Silverman, the Brand Manager and Program Director at legendary All-News station, KYW in Philadelphia.  I had heard of him from my colleagues at KIRO (where he also worked previously) and others in the industry who hold him in high regard.

Once I followed him on social media (https://twitter.com/AlexSilverman) and spent time exchanging e-mails with him for this piece, I could see why.

He has an amazing amount of energy, enthusiasm, and optimism for news radio.  He also has the right ideas and the right mindset to take a heritage brand like KYW into new, younger generations of listeners.

KYW recently added an FM simulcast for the first time in its long history.  I wanted to talk about that, Alex’s thoughts on the format and how his team handled Wednesday’s shocking events in Washington D.C.

Wednesday was truly a surreal day in the history of our country.  How were you able to approach it…personally and professionally?

It was surreal, upsetting, and scary for sure, but I knew we had a team that could handle whatever the day might bring. We know that hundreds of thousands of people not only depend on us on a daily basis, but when something of great consequence happens, they turn to us because they trust us. That is a great responsibility which we take very seriously.

The past year has stretched everyone in every newsroom across this country to the limit, but it has also shown me how capable our newsroom is of handling the unexpected and the challenging. My role in these types of situations is to make sure the team has the support and guidance they need. As soon as things started to take a turn, we mobilized two reporters to Washington – one of whom was already in Delaware covering President-Elect Biden. We knew we were the closest Entercom all-news station to DC, so we would not only be able to serve our audience but also millions of listeners across the country. We had additional reporters working remotely who started calling their local contacts, and everyone shifted into continuous coverage mode: the anchors, the editors and production team, and the digital content team – and stayed that way into the night. We needed to not only make it sound big and important, but to place it in the context it deserved – as a dark day in the history of this country – so we talked a lot about the language we would use to communicate that.

What differentiated your coverage from what other media outlets were doing?

We’re fortunate to have the most experienced broadcast reporting team in Philadelphia, and that institutional knowledge and those contacts paid off immediately. One of the great things about all-news radio is our ability to pivot immediately into continuous crisis coverage. While there are a lot of moving parts to our operation, when it comes down to critical breaking news information, once it’s confirmed it’s just “hit the sounder, open the mic, and tell the world.” So, whether you were listening on 103.9 FM, or on a smart speaker in a home office, or on the RADIO.COM app, you were learning what was happening literally as we were seeing it with our own eyes or verifying it. RADIO.COM allows us to send push alerts to a larger audience beyond our typical listeners, and we were simultaneously producing newscasts for our sister stations in Philadelphia because this was a situation where people needed to know what was happening in real time.

Talk about your background and how your career journey brought you to KYW.

I’ve always been fascinated by the intimacy of radio and the one-on-one connection it creates with the listener; it’s something that I recognized at a young age and just knew I wanted to be in the business. I actually started out in management – as the GM of the greatest student-run radio station in America, WJPZ at Syracuse University – before getting my first on-air news job at WSYR in Syracuse. I spent some time in Seattle at KIRO as a reporter and anchor, then eight years at WCBS 880 in New York City, first as an anchor and reporter and later as APD. When the legendary Steve Butler retired in 2018, it was an amazing opportunity to be able to come to KYW Newsradio and lead one of the country’s great all-news stations.

What are the best parts of your job?

Getting to work with such a talented and connected team of broadcast journalists is a huge privilege. I learn something from them every day. When we break news and tell stories that matter to people, we get an enormously positive response from the audience and that’s always a great feeling.

Technology is providing many of the service elements all-news stations would provide (news-traffic-weather, etc.) on demand and instantly.  How does this format stay relevant in 2021 and beyond?

I’d push back on the premise just a bit because there’s a distinction between the content itself and the technology used to convey it. “Technology” on its own can’t produce the service we provide – it can’t replicate the journalism experience and institutional knowledge and storytelling ability. That said, as technology evolves, we are evolving right along with it. If you have a smart speaker at home and want the news from a credible, local source, all you have to do is ask it to “play KYW Newsradio.” All our stories are available on demand in both written and audio form on KYWnewsradio.com and on the RADIO.COM app. We’re on social media at the same time we’re on the air with a story. We have a local news interview podcast, KYW Newsradio In Depth, that focuses on big ideas that we wouldn’t have time to dive into in our typical format. All of this makes us a really strong part of the modern news ecosystem.

As for traffic, sure – the apps are great, I use them like everyone else. But they don’t tell the full story. If I’m stuck in traffic, I want to know what the heck is really happening and why. It takes a human being to provide that color commentary and that’s the service our listeners tell us they appreciate. The same goes for weather. We have a fabulous partnership with NBC10 here in Philadelphia. When weather is a story, people want someone they trust to explain what it means.

Your station was given an FM signal for the first time in its history and got a fresh rebranding as well.  What have the early returns been from your listeners and sponsors?

It’s incredibly exciting for us, and we saw the launch on 103.9 FM in late November as one of the most historic moments ever in Philadelphia media. It not only improves the quality of service for our existing audience, but also allows us to reach some areas where the 1060 AM signal was never particularly strong. I was actually driving around one of those areas in Bucks County the day we launched, and – I swear – the clerk at a deli saw my jacket and said “when’s KYW gonna be on FM? It’s so staticky around here.” I told him, and he was thrilled. So, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both listeners and sponsors who know there’s more of a chance for new listeners to discover us on the FM band. It’s still too early to make any sweeping statements about the impact, but we’re very optimistic.

Caption- Alex Silverman talks about the FM simulcast on NBC10 in Philadelphia

You’re VERY active on social media which is not common for many Program Directors.  What’s your strategy behind that?

Having spent a lot of time on the on-air side, I’m used to having a public voice and engaging with the audience. It’s a good way to keep in mind that there are real people out there who have opinions and perspectives on what we’re doing, and I think they appreciate that kind of direct engagement. We can’t ever take our audience for granted, so we have to be everywhere they are – and social media is one of those places.

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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A photo of clocks

News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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BNM Writers

News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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A photo featuring I voted stickers

The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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