Radio chain experiments in Houston
All-news station no surprise given founder’s passion for keeping listeners informed
When Radio One founder Cathy Hughes was 8, she said during a recent Houston visit, “I imagined I had a radio show in our bathroom.”
She lived in low-income public housing in Omaha, Neb., she recalled, and she’d lock the door while she played.
“I only did news. My toothbrush was my microphone,” Hughes said. “Sometimes my brothers would be waiting outside to attack me, and they became the lead story.”
Hughes still loves radio news, but Radio One is mostly about R&B, rap, hiphop, urban adult contemporary, gospel and soul — as well as urban talk shows hosted by Al Sharpton, Roland Martin and others.
The Washington, D.C.based radio network owns 55 stations, with four in Houston, including FM stalwarts The Box 97.9 and Majic102, locally rated Nos. 1 and 2, respectively.
But Hughes has a soft spot for another of her Houston holdings, News 92 FM, the only all-news sta-
tion in the chain.
“It makes me happy that we’re the first and only African-American run company” to have a 24-hour-news station in the general market, said Hughes, who is now 66 and chairwoman of the company. Her son Alfred Liggins is CEO.
For Radio One, News 92 has been a challenge. Its ratings are nothing like those for top-rated The Box, a rhythmic Top 40 format, or the adult urban contemporary Majic102.
News 92 has been rated 25th out of 44 locally in the Nielson Audio market profile over the past four months. But Radio One is not about to give up on news, she said, and for good reason. Revenue drivers
All-news radio stations can be strong revenue generators, said Frank Saxe, managing editor of Inside Radio, an industry trade publication.
The all-news format “over-performs” in revenue in relation to its ratings, he said, because its listeners represent a high-income, highly educated demographic. The all-news WTOP in Washington, D.C., has the highest revenue from ad sales of any station the U.S., he said.
With News 92, Radio One can go after a mainstream audience, “where most of the fish are,” he said.
Music stations are limited in the number of commercials they can run because the ads are perceived as disruptive by listeners, said Don Watson, president of News Talk Media, a Pensacola, Fla.based consulting firm. He was news and program director for Houston’s KPRC radio in the 1970s when it was a news station.
But with spoken-word radio formats, he said, ads are viewed as a form of information and not as intrusive — at least to a degree. That means talk and news shows can run more ads per hour.
Unlike some political talk-radio formats, which can scare away some advertisers, all-news is a safe environment, Saxe said. He said that’s increasingly important in the age of social media, where controversy can spread quickly.
But all-news stations are expensive to run because they require larger staffs. News 92 has about 50 employees, including locally known members of the media.
Morning anchors J.P. Pritchard and Lana Hughes were fixtures at KTRH-740 AM when it was a news station and moving more into talk radio. Former television personalities Mike Barajas, Carolyn Campbell and Craig Roberts are also onair, for example. Norm Uhl is managing editor. ‘Breaking the mold’
News 92 airs a mixture of national news on the hour, local headlines, traffic, weather, sports, business and local stories a minute or so in length.
“Over the past decade, we haven’t seen many all-news stations sign on,” Saxe said. “They’re breaking the mold a little bit.” It often takes three years for a music station to catch on, and five years for all-news, he said.
All-news is a tough format today, but it can be done, Watson said, if it offers compelling, reliable programming.
“Houston is a big city with a lot of traffic,” he said, “and you know you’ve got a lot of people in those cars.”
In the important morning hours, News 92 has competition from KUHF88.7 FM with “Morning Edition,” a well-known brand from National Public Radio, Watson said.
But Saxe sees NPR and News 92 as more complementary than competitive.
“NPR is more deeper insight news, and News 92 is more for quick headlines, traffic and weather,” he said. “It’s for shorterterm listening. People use it as a utility.” What drives traffic
Doug Abernethy, regional vice president of Radio One’s Houston stations, said News 92 has not had the opportunity to cover the big kind of story that would allow it to stand out.
“Since we launched we haven’t had a tropical storm or hurricane, that huge traffic driver where everyone scrambles to the news stations,” he said.
“We did wall-to-wall coverage of the 2012 elections and aired all the presidential debates, but we were so new, and nobody knew about us.”
Abernethy acknowledged that there are so many ways people can get their news today.
“But,” he added, “we still own the dashboard.”
During a Radio One quarterly conference call in February, Liggins said Houston, the company’s largest market, “is on fire,” driven by the local economy.
Ratings for Radio One’s Houston urban music stations are “up substantially,” he said.
The Box has been consistently drawing about 1.3 million cumulative listeners on average per week, according to Nielsen Media.
Liggins also said News 92 has “a whole new pool of advertisers ... even though the ratings haven’t really gone to where we want them to go.”
Radio One also owns a local HD gospel station, Praise 102.1 HD2.
The company had total revenues of $380 million last year. ‘The Quiet Storm’
Before Hughes launched Radio One in 1980, she was general manager of Howard University’s WHUR, where she created the late-night romanticmusic format “The Quiet Storm,” featuring love ballads. At its peak, The Quiet Storm aired on 487 stations. Those numbers have dwindled, but it still can be heard nightly on Majic102.
After WHUR, she went to 33 banks before she secured a loan for her and then-husband Dewey Hughes to buy WOL, a Washington, D.C., music station in 1979. The Hugheses divorced soon after.
The station struggled at first, and she lost her house and had her car repossessed and had to live in the station, Hughes said.
She changed the station format from music to talk and did a lot of the talking. “The Cathy Hughes Show,” aimed at AfricanAmerican listeners, ran from 1980 to 1998.
Radio One acquired other stations, and when it went public in 1999, she became one of the first female African-American women to head a publicly traded company.
Her mother, Helen Jones Woods, also blazed a music-related trail. She was a trombonist in the jazz and swing group, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, considered the first integrated allwomen’s band in the U.S. ‘There’s a trust factor’
While News 92 is Radio One’s only all-news outlet, Hughes said all the company’s stations can sometimes serve a newsrelated role.
“Black radio is a cultural phenomenon,” she said. “There’s a trust factor. Black radio replaced blackowned newspapers and magazines of yesterday and is second only to black churches when it comes to trust and believability.”
During the attacks of Sept. 11, Hughes said, “many African-Americans watched TV with the sound off and tuned in to black radio stations.”