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All-News Station Pivots to All-Beyoncé

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Don’t Blame Houston Listeners, Some Tell Radio One

CNN’s Sole Black Executive Producer Quits

Latino, Black Millennials Use Phones as Top News Source

Do Presidential Approval Ratings Mean Same Thing Today?

GAO Confirms Voter ID Controversy Is a Scam

Young Black Men 21 Times More Likely to Be Killed by Cops

“5 Craziest Things People in the West Say About Ebola”

In South Dakota, Oct. 12 Holds Different Significance 

Short Takes

In this video, adweek.com posted a supercut of Beyoncé’s best commercial work. Radio One is programming KROI-FM in Houston all Beyoncé all the time until a new format is announced. (video)

Don’t Blame Houston Listeners, Some Tell Radio One

Updating Oct. 13: – “Today, Radio One announced its new permanent format, Boom 92.1 FM, a Classic Hip Hop station. It is the first major market throwback Hip Hop station of its kind in the country. And [it’s] Houston’s own,” Radio One announced. Full statement in the Comments section below.

Beyoncé fans might be ecstatic over Radio One’s decision to drop its boldly formatted but low-rated all-news Houston radio station, but others are challenging the black-controlled network’s assertion that Houstonians just weren’t ready for so much journalism.

For the moment, at least, the station is all Beyoncé all the time.

“It’s not Houston’s fault that News 92 FM failed,” read a headline in the Houston Chronicle Wednesday over a column by Ken Hoffman.

“On its website, Radio One blamed poor ratings,” Hoffman wrote. “It went on to say, ‘Unfortunately, the market (Houston) hasn’t shown a sustainable appetite for news radio.’

“I’m not sure that’s accurate. We don’t know if Houston has an appetite for news radio. We just know it didn’t eat up News 92 FM. . . .”

Hoffman noted that all-news radio stations score big ratings in other cities and added, “Station insiders acknowledged that story repetition and selection was always an issue with listeners. ‘There were too few stories, repeated too often,'” one told me. ‘We were a good station. We would have had to be great to beat KTRH.’

“With Houston’s slow-moving traffic, a news station here needs a lot of stories and constant updates to hold listeners. News 92 FM listeners could hear the same story two or three times on a single business call to Katy or The Woodlands. It wasn’t compelling radio. . . .”

Mary Benton, who represents the region that includes Texas on the board of the National Association of Black Journalists, offered this assessment to Journal-isms via email:

“It was a solid news station with some really top-notch journalists. Many of them had been victims of downsizing and layoffs from bigger news outlets. I was thrilled when former colleagues found opportunities at the all news radio station.

“The station had [its] moments, exclusive stories and reliable coverage during breaking news, but the one thing I heard people criticize was the fact that the station repeated stories too often throughout the day. As a journalist I noticed the stories weren’t rewritten, or edited with a different sound bite. The same story would loop every fifteen minutes all day long.

“In the end, it was tough for News 92 to gain a large audience to climb up in the ratings. I wish all the former employees the absolute best. There aren’t enough news jobs in Houston to absorb all those folks. The media landscape continues to shift. Journalists must learn to adjust.”

Jerome Solomon, a sports columnist at the Chronicle and president of the Houston Association of Black Journalists, agreed.

“I will add that sportswise there are so many options in town (an unheard of five all-sports stations, not including the Spanish one) that people who are looking for sports news wouldn’t bother with 92.1, though the network had a couple of sports reporters who were known from their work in TV here,” Solomon said by email. “I assume that missing audience would make a strong dent in an all-news format’s potential listener base. Without sports fans ever needing to come to the station to check for the latest news, the opportunity to capture them was very limited.”

As David Barron reported Wednesday in the Chronicle, “KROI (92.1 FM), the all-news station owned by Radio One, said today it has ceased news operations and the station’s 47 employees have been laid off.

“The station, which launched an all-news format three years ago, is now airing music by Beyoncé as it transitions toward an as-yet-unannounced format.

“Yashima Azilove, vice president of corporate communications for Radio One, cited poor Nielsen Audio/Arbitron ratings in the decision to shut down the all-news format.

” ‘We set out three years ago to make history,’ she said. ‘There was a void in the marketplace, so we launched the first FM all-news station in the market. We invested significant dollars as well as human capital to make it work, but after three years, the marketplace has spoken.

” ‘We have had continued poor ratings and significant financial losses. It was an unfortunate but necessary decision to transition our format. . . .’ “

In a telephone interview Friday, Azilove said the data backed her position, though others are entitled to their opinions. “The quality of the product is not something we question,” she said.

But as Radio One said in its statement, “The Nielsen Audio ratings book for September showed that KROI, which was known as News 92.1, ranked 26th among all Houston stations with a 0.9 percent audience share among listeners 12 years old and older for the weeklong 6 a.m.-to-midnight ratings period. . . .”

Staffers seemed resigned to their fate. “We are heart broken cause we put everything into this station but it just wasn’t meant to be,” Lanny Griffith, traffic master, said on his Facebook page, Barbara Kuntz reported Wednesday for CultureMap. She added that “the station spent about $900,000 on an expansion project for a new studio, newsroom, offices and green room, according to media expert Mike McGuff. . . .”

The decision to go all-Beyoncé in the superstar’s hometown was an attention-grabber. On Wednesday, Chris Gray, writing in the Houston Press, called it “The talk of the radio world today” and added, “If anyone is curious, the combined discographies of Destiny’s Child and Beyonce have a total running time of approximately eight hours and 45 minutes. Live albums and DC’s 2005 greatest-hits #1’s are included, but not singles, EPs or remixes. . . .”

The all-news format was a first for Radio One and a first for Houston. But, as Azilove told Houston’s KTRK-TV, “In looking to make a transition, we go back to what we know.”

The Beyoncé format won’t last, however.

Azilove told Journal-isms to stay tuned to the station for an announcement Monday at 5 p.m. Central time.

CNN’s Sole Black Executive Producer Quits

A day after a longtime CNN employee filed a $5 million wrongful-termination and discrimination lawsuit against the network, the only African American executive producer of a show at CNN resigned.

Tenisha Taylor Bell, who produced Fredricka Whitfield’s block of “CNN Newsroom” and is former executive producer of “Around The World with Suzanne Malveaux,” sent this message to colleagues on Tuesday:

“Hi Team Fred,

“As you know I’ve been on vacation for a few days. While away, I’ve been doing some soul searching and I’ve decided that at this time that I would like to go in a different direction with my career. This is a very hard decision for me. You ALL are like family to me. But of course, I have to make the best decision for Aidan and myself at this time. So I have decided to resign from CNN. You have been a great team to work with. I thank you for all of your hard work and dedication. I wish everyone the very best. You can reach me at Tenisha (at) PerfectPitchMediaGroup.com or my cell. . . .”

Bell, immediate past president of the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists, described herself on the website of her Perfect Pitch Media Group: “She is a 16+ year award winning media executive and communications specialist. For the past 11 years Tenisha served as an executive producer for CNN. She was responsible for the execution of live programming on a daily basis. One of her main management responsibilities included recruiting diverse voices as guests and contributors across CNN platforms. Tenisha mastered the art of recognizing superb guest pitches from those that fail to deliver. Her industry knowledge of how guests are screened, selected and booked for television is how she strategically advises clients in crafting their Perfect Pitch. . . .”

In the suit filed Monday, Stanley Wilson said he was promoted only once during his tenure at CNN, in 2003, despite applying for a dozen job openings. The National Association of Black Journalists issued a statement Wednesday saying it “is concerned about the atmosphere for African Americans at CNN. . . .”

Latino, Black Millennials Use Phones as Top News Source

Most millennial voters — 53 percent — get their news on their smartphones or tablets, according to a new Fusion poll released today,” the Fusion network said on Thursday. “But the numbers look a little different when broken down by ethnicity:“

“And where millennials go to get their political news might surprise you:“

“When it comes to social media, Facebook is still king.“

“And by Race:“

Do Presidential Approval Ratings Mean Same Thing Today?

“In a very long Rolling Stone piece making the case that Barack Obama has been a great — or, at least, very consequential — president,” Chris Cillizza wrote Thursday for the Washington Post, “New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes this intriguing paragraph:

” ‘Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn’t mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn’t happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage — Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states — most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn’t what you’d expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.’ . . .”

Meanwhile, Obama said Thursday “that tiered Internet service should not be allowed, and he expected the FCC to insure that it did not happen,” John Eggerton wrote for Broadcasting & Cable.

Also, Sara Rafsky wrote Friday for the Committee to Protect Journalists, “In May, my blog post looked at what had changed in the seven months since CPJ’s first comprehensive report on press freedom in the United States, authored by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr. The answer then, as it is now, was not much. Though the cast of characters and the specific settings might have shifted, it feels like journalists are stuck in the same play with the president. . . .”

GAO Confirms Voter ID Controversy Is a Scam

“A new report by the Government Accountability Office has confirmed what other researchers and unbiased observers knew all along: the whole voter ID controversy is a scam intended to drive down voter turnout among groups that do not tend to vote Republican, and unfortunately, to some degree that scam has succeeded,” Jay Bookman wrote Thursday in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Now, the stern, academically minded folks at the GAO did not put it in quite those terms. But after its researchers compared voting patterns in six similar states in both the 2012 and 2008 elections, including two states — Tennessee and Kansas — that had passed voter-ID laws post 2008, it reached a clear conclusion:

” ‘GAO’s analysis suggests that the turnout decreases in Kansas and Tennessee beyond decreases in the comparison states were attributable to changes in those two states’ voter ID requirements. GAO found that turnout among eligible and registered voters declined more in Kansas and Tennessee than it declined in comparison states — by an estimated 1.9 to 2.2 percentage points more in Kansas and 2.2 to 3.2 percentage points more in Tennessee. . . .”

Young Black Men 21 Times More Likely to Be Killed by Cops

“Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts — 21 times greater, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings,” Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Eric Sagara reported Friday for ProPublica.

“The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.7 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

“One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica’s analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week.

“ProPublica’s risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population. . . .”

In South Dakota, Oct. 12 Holds Different Significance 

“An unprecedented event happened in South Dakota 24 years ago, an event that has not been duplicated by any other state: South Dakota adopted October 12 as a state holiday to be called Native American Day,” Tim Giago wrote Sept. 15 for the Huffington Post, anticipating this weekend.

“By selecting October 12, South Dakota eliminated, for all intent and purpose, Columbus Day as a holiday. But the ensuing 24 years have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that old habits are hard to break.

“The Native American Day holiday did not occur by happenstance. It certainly was not anything advocated by the state’s largest newspapers, television or radio stations, or by the state’s 100 weekly newspapers. It was instead a holiday advocated by the only independent, Indian-owned weekly newspaper in the state, the original Lakota Times (No connection to the current Lakota Country Times). . . .”

Giago also wrote, “But as I alluded to earlier, change comes hard in this state. The state’s white-owned media has done little to promote Native American Day. Out-of-state retail chains like Walmart, Target, K-Mart, J.C. Penney’s and Lowe’s, and others, with their corporate mentality, still advertise ‘Columbus Day’ sales. And above all, the state government of South Dakota has been woefully negligent in stepping forward to celebrate a day that honors Native Americans.

“It seems to me that the people of South Dakota are not fully aware that what they accomplished is unique in American history. Of the 50 States of the Union, only one has set aside a state sanctioned holiday to honor Native Americans and in so doing has diminished a holiday, Columbus Day, that most Native Americans find offensive. Witness the Native protests that take place across America (except in South Dakota) every October 12. In South Dakota we made this happen without firing a shot.

“If South Dakota’s white-owned media had come up with the idea of Native American Day, or of a Year of Reconciliation, perhaps they would be more apt to promote and honor these days, but it seems to me that because the Lakota people and a Lakota-owned newspaper did it for them, they are hesitant, fearful and even envious of promoting this special day. They even neglect to report truthfully about how this day began. They instead credit a white governor and white legislature totally ignoring the all-important instigating role played by me and the Native Americans at the Lakota Times.

“I would say to the Lakota people that October 12 is our day. . . .”

The University of California at San Diego adds, “California Native American Day was established as an official state holiday in 1998. Today, all California schools recognize the fourth Friday in September as the official Native American holiday. . . “

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