There’s been buzz about two Clear Channel radio stations in Wisconsin that have sold off the naming rights to their newsrooms. WISN in Milwaukee christened the “PyraMax Bank News Center” last year; come January, anchors at Madison’s WIBA will report from the “Amcore Bank News Center.” WISN and WIBA constitute Clear Channel’s primary news presence in both markets and both stations carry conservative-talk formats.
The deals have been portrayed as a kind of throwback to the “Camel News Caravan” days. Sort of quaint, even. Any working/teaching journalist who believes this should hang it up and bundle themselves into a rocking chair to reminisce on the golden years. The menace of such sponsorship is the perception it stands to engender about who bankrolls your news. Not to mention that it’s tacky as f*ck. Wasn’t appropriate then, still not now.
This is all very ironic since commercial radio news today is a shell of what it once was. The WISN and WIBA newsrooms actually serve multiple stations in their respective clusters; some Clear Channel newsrooms even act as regional hubs feeding news to stations in multiple clusters across markets. Yet news departments either usually barely break even or lose money because the amount of advertising inventory one can sell around newscasts is not enough to pay for the staff they take to produce.
This is why radio stations used to look at newsrooms as investments of a non-financial sort, part of providing a public service – another quaint notion. The hyper-consolidation that followed the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 decimated radio newsrooms, especially in smaller markets, as individual stations merged into clusters and corporate bean-counters cut anything that dragged on immediate profitability. Leading this pack was Clear Channel and its ilk. Now the sale of newsroom naming rights is put forth as necessary to cover the “high cost of producing quality news.” Such a statement is loaded with relativity.
What I’d like to know is if Madison and Milwaukee are aberrations, or if the names of Clear Channel newsrooms are for sale nationwide.
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