Newcastle Herald story on NEWFM & 2HD staff departures

14Jan09

The only reason Talkin’ Sport was created was because Caralis was dirty on the NRL and Macquarie Radio Group for not giving 2SM at least part of the radio rights to the NRL. Frankly I hope they axe Talking Sport because it is boring

Can someone explain why Richard King was told about this at a local shopping center?
I think that’s disgusting. Richard is a lovely man and deserve better than to be told that way. Hopefully good and better things will come for Richard in 2009.

Bread
Milk
Butter
Fire Richard King
Tomatoes
Cheese
hhhmmmm did i get everything!

Richard King is without a doubt the best voice and personality on Newcastle radio. He’s a very genuine and sincere person who actually treats his callers and audience with respect.

The people who made this decision obviously know little about ratings.

Sure – when you look at Richards ratings in PERCENTAGE terms, they don’t look great. However, looking only at total people percentages is flawed for 2 reasons:

1. Richard was up against Australia’s number one radio show – THE HAMISH AND ANDY SHOW, which targets the under 40 demo.

Richard (and 2HD) target the over 40′s, specifically over 55′s.

Therefore, it unfair to just look at Richards percentage (around 9%) and say its a poor result as it misses the fact that Hamish and Andy have attracted a huge new audience to drive, which in turn has increased the pool of younger listeners between 4pm-7pm, making it harder for older focused stations like 2HD to get a good percentage.

The same thing happened to Derryn Hinch on 3AW when Hamish and Andy first started. Hinch’s percentage went from 17 to 10 almost overnight. However, Hinch did not actually lose any listeners – it was just that Hamish and Andy attracted many new listeners to the drive slot, making Hinch’s existing audience a smaller percentage of the new total drive audience.

2. Richard had no producer – not even a phone operator. Whereas his competition on KO, NX and even ABC have production crews.

Graeme Gilbert can count himself lucky that he has the night time shift – always the hardest shift for FM stations to attract younger listeners. This allows Gilbert to appear he has big audience at night on 2HD (around 20-25%), when in fact his actual audience is only around 5000 people in Newcastle. It’s just that there’s no completion from the FM stations, allowing 2HD to have a big percentage at night, but not really a huge audience as it first appears when looking at the percentages.

Mr Ashford said when he started that Newfm would be in line with Nxfm! That was 9 months ago leaving 15 moths to go an Newfm is worse off now with even lower listener ratings than before stop trying to be Ko an Nx cause it aint working Newfm. Maybe head for Kofm’s ratings or maybe TrippleJ’s cause u really have no chance at beating Nx at their game maybe start ur own. Ild really love New to produce good sound again it’s been a long time…. Can Caralis be sacked?? :}

Lisa forgot to have on her list “Fire Don Mayo”,,,apparently Don was given the option- resign or we sack ya…then Ashford states that he has a serious illness which affects his sight and ability to work….good luck getting another job..

Given that many of the others let go or sacked by Bill Caralis and others at 2HD and NEWFM have gone on to bigger and better things eg: Aaron Kearney (1233 ABC breakfast host), Roger Clemens (he now does surf reports for NXFM and KOFM) etc, I think Richard King can look forward to having plenty of success elsewhere. Billy Caralis is starting to behave like the Brtian Smith of the radio industry.

What a sad industry radio is when a talent like Richard King is given the flick.Give Richard the man power behind him like a producer and phone operator and it would be a very different result. The fact is when 2HD was sold to Bill Caralis it slowly died. When programs are fed to it via other stations to cut costs,it loses it’s identity.It’s all about money.
I did midnight to dawn shift for a while and was part of the cost cutting exercise
when Mr Caralis took over. I predicted the present outcome to other presenters and the Newcastle Herald.

its now time for bill to sell his radio network can someone do us all a favour and buy it from him

Steve

Unfortunately Caralis is an accumulator not seller. He has allegedly been offered vast sums for his network, which has a great footprint, but never been interested in selling.

He has always treated his radio properties more like real estate investments media industry investments. He keeps buying them up, stripping costs and letting them slowly run down. The story is the same throughout the network.

Caralis doesn’t appear to have much emotional attachment to broadcasting, just squeezing what dollars he can out of his properties.

The media investment market is way off the boil now so I doubt there would be many suitors even if Bill was ready to sell.

Meanwhile regional radio and audiences suffer.

There’s a letter from Richard King in today’s Herald and it definitely implies that someone at 2HD is lying about the reason why King was axed from the weekday drive shift.

[...] Recent programming changes on 2HD mean that live and local on what was once known as Newcastle’s home of news, talk and sport barely exists. [...]

The comments all speak about whats happening to 2HD. They the managerment has made a great error. I would hope that they still retain Richard King service as he has good talent for radio and hope that this region doesn’t loose him.

My name is Anthony Maroon , I have been a radio announcer for 20 years and in the business for 22years .Recently i took my children north from Sydney for a gold coast holiday.I listened with great sadness to stations in newcastle ,taree, coffs etc. All the networking and links and lines dropping out . as a result of all this lame networking and cost cutting the art of being a radio announcer is a dying art . in the old days we would say to kids go the bush and learn your trade but these days the bush is the last place i would send anyone to learn radio. kofm , Nxfm and Star fm Gosford all sound fine , ever other radio station i listened to heading up the pacific highway was pretty much garbage.

Anthony

That is a great appraisal of the problems in regional radio and especially the Supernetwork.

Its a disgrace and its very sad.

agee with anthony – used to listen to u back on i98fm – it’s a sad state of radio on the highway. some of those stations were once very good.
good luck on your new gig in sydney!!!

m

No problem. You lost me with this one. I am listening to another radio station now.