Money makers despite challenges

Shutdown of Hamden’s WQUN is unusual, trade group exec says

Perhaps the best way to describe the state of AM radio in Connecticut is to quote Mark Twain, who died a decade before the first commercial radio station began broadcasting.

“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Twain famously told a reporter in a New York Journal story that appeared in June 1897.

And so it is with AM radio stations operating in Connecticut. Outside of powerful, 50,000-watt WTIC-AM, other local stations on that part of the radio band have considerably smaller audiences than years ago.

But many broadcast industry experts say that if managed properly and aimed at the right niche audience, local AM radio stations can be profitable.

“If it is done right, an FCC license is license to print money,” said Steve Kalb, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Connecticut and a former staffer during the heyday of New Haven radio station WELIAM. “It always has been. Stations routinely run a 40 percent return on investment.”

That doesn’t stop radio stations from shutting down, or “going dark” as they say in the industry. And later this spring, New Haven-area radio listeners are about to experience that first-hand when Quinnipiac University shuts down Hamden-based WQUN, the community radio station it has operated since 1997. That plan struck some industry observers as unusual.

The station, which is at 1220 AM, operates 1,000 watts daytime and 305 watts nights. It presents pop and rock standards from 1965-85 and is the home for Quinnipiac University sports broadcasts.

But Kalb and other industry experts say WQUN’s real value is its local news and public affairs program that can’t be found on any other New Haven area radio station.

“I cannot think of another radio station that provides local radio news that involves someone standing in front of me asking questions with a microphone,” he said of WQUN, noting that WELI’s “local” news is now generated

from a centralized newsroom that the station’s owner, iHeartRadio, operates from upstate New York. “There is an opportunity to sell (advertising) based upon local radio news coverage. You mean to tell me people don’t care about what’s going on in their local neighborhoods?”

The station also creates a level of good will in surrounding communities that can’t be quantified in dollars and cents, said Scott Fybush, a principal of Fybush Media, a Rochester, N.Y.-based broadcast consulting group.

“There’s a community relations aspect of it,” Fybush said. “Presumably people in the community are holding the university in higher regard because they operate the station.”

Quinnipiac officials haven’t publicly identified a lack of profitability as a reason for shutting WQUN down.

In a letter sent out the university community on Jan. 11, Lynn Bushnell, the school’s vice president for public affairs, said the decision was made to “more closely match the ever-changing needs and interests of our students, and to better prepare them for future employment opportunities.

“When WQUN first went on the air in 1997, it was used as a training ground where students would learn and hone their broadcasting skills before graduating and securing jobs in the radio industry,” Bushnell said in the letter. “The number of students who even consider a career in radio or who want to intern at WQUN-AM has declined sharply, prompting the university to re-examine the prudence of continuing to operate a community radio station.”

The building and property on Whitney Avenue will be retained and repurposed as part of the strategic planning process, Bushnell wrote. University spokesman John Morgan said that while the station will end operations June 30, it will stop broadcasting on May 31.

The station has four fulltime and four part-time employees, he said.

The station’s transmitter towers are located on Denslow Hill Road in Hamden, which is near Sacred Heart Academy. Fybush said that in some cases, the land on which an AM station’s transmitter towers is located is worth more if sold to a developer than what a buyer might pay for the broadcast license.

Morgan said the university is willing to entertain offers for the station’s license but didn’t comment on whether it has already tried actively marketing the station to potential buyers. He said school officials haven’t determined what will be done with the transmitter towers property.

Fybush said the market for AM radio stations has changed.

“There are a lot more niche operators getting into the business.” he said.

One example of that is in Fairfield County where Sacred Heart University is in the midst of selling one of two AM stations it acquired in 2011.

School officials informed the FCC that they are selling WNLK-AM in Norwalk to a Ridgefield man, Steve Lee, president and chief executive officer of Veritas Catholic Network, said George Lombardi, general manager of WSHU, the school’s National Public Radio affiliate. The federal government shutdown is holding up the approval of the sale, which was filed with the FCC at the end of November, Lombardi said.

A trade publication, Radio + Television Business Report, is reporting that Veritas Catholic Network is buying WNLK for $300,000. Lombardi would not comment on the sale price.

Dennis Wharton, executive vice president for communications with the National Association of Broadcasters, said AM radio stations like the two in Fairfield County and WQUN “are an entry point for first-time owners of broadcast properties.”

“For a station like WQUN to go dark is just very unusual,” he said. “AM is pretty challenged, but it’s still a profitable business.”

When the school acquired WNLK and Stamford-based WSTC-AM in 2011, Lombardi said the stations would be used to air talk radio programming that NPR produces but didn’t fit into WSHU’s broadcast.

“After two years of operating that way, we found that our competition was all on the FM dial,” he said.

To address that problem, the station began the process to put in place an FM translator for WNLK — designed to rebroadcast all of the programming of the original station, thereby expanding its reach.

But the process became bogged down and now Lombardi estimates it will be at least another year get the WNLK translator at 103.9-FM up and running. The translator will allow Veritas to simulcast on the FM dial, where Veritas Catholic Network will air the programming of the radio division of the Eternal Word Television Network.