And then there was one.
The pending $165 million sale of WNIB-FM 97.1, Chicago’s top-rated classical music radio station, and its sister station, WNIZ-FM 96.9, to a radio conglomerate, Bonneville International Corp., will leave WFMT-FM 98.7, WNIB’s better-funded competitor for 45 years, as the sole bastion of classical radio broadcasting in the area.
Although Bonneville’s chief executive says the corporation has made no decision whether to retain WNIB’s classical format when the deal closes Feb. 1, it doesn’t require perfect 20/20 vision to see the handwriting on the wall. Even Sonia Florian and her husband, Bill, the last independent owners of a major FM signal in Chicago (they’ve owned and operated WNIB as a mom-and-pop labor of love since the station’s inception in 1955), have said the classical format will depart along with them.
I can’t blame the Florians for selling out. Forty-five years is long enough to run a storefront radio operation, especially now that mega-mergers are devouring the little guys and broadcasters are looking to a future predicated on satellite radio and the Internet. WFMT already has taken the 21st Century plunge with its new “Network Chicago” initiative linking its programming and community involvement to that of its corporate sibling, WTTW-Ch. 11, the Web and “City Talk,” the new weekly arts, entertainment and public affairs tabloid published by Window to the World Communications Inc., parent company to WFMT and WTTW. The Florians’ “little station that could” was ill equipped to compete with such multimedia synergy.
Still, it’s always sad when another classical radio station goes belly up. A decade ago, there were 52 commercial stations in the U.S. that offered classical music as their primary format; now we are down to 37.
Each fatality reminds us how vulnerable such “niche” programming is in today’s broadcast market, where tens of millions of dollars in revenues ride on commanding a coveted spot on the dial. With the classical-recording industry on the ropes, and serious music virtually absent from network television, we need every radio outlet we have to remind people that classical music matters, that a lot of people want more from their radios and computers than ’80s rock or the latest mega-hit download.
What is amazing about the WNIB sale is not that it happened at all but that it didn’t happen sooner. “The problem has been obvious for many years,” says Rich Marschner, former WFMT general manager, now executive vice president of WCLV-FM, Cleveland’s commercial classical station. “The two stations (WNIB and WFMT) were competing for the limited advertising revenue the classical format generates in any market. That really kept the ad rates down at both stations and limited the `up’ side for (them) in a way nobody in our business has had to face for a long time.”
The fact that Chicago had two classical radio stations for 45 years made us an envied anomaly in the broadcast industry. Now we are like every other radio market where there is one commercial station to serve the needs of classical music listeners — an older, educated, affluent demographic that is important more in buying power than in numbers, thus it’s not the demographic many advertisers seek. Of course, everything is relative. Chicago is a lot better off than Philadelphia and Detroit, which have no classical radio stations at all. Denver is in the process of losing its commercial classical station. New York, Boston and Cleveland are down to one commercial classical outlet each. So it goes.
My immediate concern once news of WNIB’s blockbuster sale broke was whether WFMT would now abandon its longtime “no jingle” policy and agree to accept prerecorded commercials, as WNIB and every other commercial classical station in the country do. But Steve Robinson, WFMT’s new vice president of radio, insists the station will continue to air announcer-read ad copy despite any sponsor pressure for them to run canned ads. “There won’t be any change in the `no jingle’ policy, not even for one minute a month,” he vows. “We will turn around and say to the sponsors, `If you want this demographic, then play ball.’ I would hope we have as much pressure to apply to them as vice versa.”
That’s good to know, but the thing I value most about classical radio as it existed in Chicago for more than four decades was that it gave you a choice. If you didn’t much care for the Bartok string quartet WNIB was playing, you could always switch your dial to the Strauss “Blue Danube” on WFMT — or vice versa. I did this a lot while driving. It’s a luxury I will miss.
Listeners who found WFMT announcers too stuffy for their tastes (I personally have never found it so) could turn for reassurance to the more middlebrow WNIB, where Karl Haas explained “good music” in an avuncular manner that reassured them it’s OK if they didn’t know much about the classics. WNIB helped them learn more. Sure, it could be quirky, but it always felt friendly and accessible. Indeed, many listeners preferred the station’s “classical lite” format for office or drive-time listening, a fact that is reflected in WNIB’s narrowly edging out WFMT in the Arbitron ratings for the last five years.
And WNIB continues to give Chicagoans classical programming it cannot hear anywhere else. I will miss announcer Bruce Duffie’s birthday salutes to performers and composers, the obscure as well as the famous. (Last month brought interviews and music honoring composers Helmut Lachenman, Gunther Schuller, Ruth Lomon and Aurelio de la Vega, as well as bass-baritone Bryn Terfel.) I will miss the Cleveland Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony concert broadcasts, assuming WFMT does not pick up those series. I will miss Chuck Schaden’s exercise in old-radio nostalgia, “Those Were the Days.” I will even miss the dogs barking and cats cavorting in the background, WNIB’s idiosyncratic trademark.
The onus now is on WFMT to maintain those standards of broadcast excellence the relatively small but intensely loyal classical listenership deserves and expects. From a corporate perspective, that should not be difficult, given the fact that WFMT’s audience almost certainly will take a dramatic leap, enabling the station to raise advertising rates and make a lot more money. And profitability is hardly a word that has been much associated with WFMT over the years.
Where WFMT has held a decisive edge over its rival is in the area of live music programming, and I hope that one of the results of WFMT’s becoming the only classical game in town will be to expand that service even further. The current “Live from Studio One,” Dame Myra Hess Series, CSO, Lyric Opera and Ravinia broadcasts are all valuable. I’d like to see WFMT give more attention to early music activity in the city and also provide a forum for Chicago composers they have not enjoyed since Ray Nordstrand and Norm Pellegrini were running the station. The Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s admirable training ensemble, deserves a radio series of its own. The possibilities are many.
I trust that in all this talk of “interactive” this and “multiplatform” over at Network Chicago, WFMT doesn’t stop respecting the commodity that has kept many of us fiercely loyal to the station for so many years — the music, presented with integrity and intelligence in a way that takes every listener seriously. If we lose that respect, we lose WFMT. And if we lose WFMT, we lose the right to call ourselves a center of culture in the Midwest.
Let WNIB’s lamentable demise as a classical bandwidth be our wake-up call to hang on dearly to the best of what we still have.
