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What Happened to Howard Stern?

Today’s Stern is everything he wasn’t when he made a name for himself nearly 40 years ago. 

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Do you ever hear any news from Howard Stern anymore? I know the media continues to get more fragmented by the day, there are more options and newsmakers than ever before, but still, Stern was once known as the “King of All Media.”

Yes, Stern has cut back on his schedule. And no one can blame him for that. He’s made hundreds of millions of dollars and can live his life however he sees fit. 

But what once made Howard Stern “must-listen” to radio was not the strippers; although that was entertaining, it was that you never knew exactly what he was going to say next or what was going to happen next. It was gripping. And it was, at its core, anti-establishment.

Today’s Howard Stern is everything he wasn’t when he made a name for himself nearly 40 years ago. 

Don’t believe me? Just Google “Howard Stern.”

Here are the headlines: 

Washington Examiner: Howard Stern loses it while talking about ‘completely unhinged’ Republicans

The Hill: Howard Stern on abortion: I miss Republicans who ‘didn’t want to invade your private life.’

Heck, this website wrote a similar piece on the same story.

If you want to go back a few months, Google “Howard Stern COVID,” and you’ll find gems like this: 

Sacramento Bee: Howard Stern says hospitals shouldn’t admit unvaccinated patients. ‘Go home and die.’

You get the point.

I’m not bothered by Howard Stern’s political beliefs. He’s entitled to them just like everyone else. But Howard Stern is a naughtier version of any no-name talking head on CNN bashing Republicans.

There’s nothing unique about it. There are no original thoughts. There’s undoubtedly nothing anti-establishment about it. The only time Howard Stern makes the news in 2022 is when he trashes Republicans because it makes media members feel good. Yes, the same mainstream media that Stern spent a career railing against. It’s funny how things come full circle. 

But this is why the likes of Joe Rogan, Dave Portnoy, and Bill Maher (to name a few) have run circles around Stern in terms of their media exposure and interest in today’s landscape. They garner more attention with growing audiences. 

Those three are harder to fit into ideological boxes, you can’t predict what they will say and what their opinions will be on various news topics and issues of the day, and they have far more depth than Stern.

Howard Stern has become everything he made a career out of not being in many ways. Predictable. Tired. Establishment. 

Maybe that’s bound to happen to a degree when one makes his kind of money. But if anyone was going to be able to buck the trend, I thought it might have been Stern. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. The excellent news is talented folks are filling the gap.

Now, who wants to tell Stern the “King of All Media” moniker has to go? Maybe they can announce it on CNN or MSNBC. But, of course, he’ll likely be watching anyway.

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2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Justin Scott

    May 18, 2022 at 7:49 pm

    There’s a point to be made about Stern’s relevancy in the day-to-day newscycle, but it’s hard to buy it in the form you’ve presented when a look at your Twitter confirms you’re a 2-time Trump voter who’s obviously bothered by his political takes despite what you said.

    I don’t think you’re advocating for only side of the story to be told as Joe Rogan has certainly voiced support for those fiercely against what Trump and his ilk are for, and Maher has obviously been a prominent left-leaning figure. But it is disengenous to attack Stern for siding with ‘the establishment” in a piece that focuses on his political opinions for multiple reasons.

    To suggest “the establishment” is a liberal force downplays stations like Fox News regularly pulling top cable numbers where their opinion hosts, like those CNN & MSNBC ones you brought up, often offer one-size-fits-all “Democrats bad” takes that offer as little or even less depth than Stern’s opinions you cited and got so annoyed by that you wrote a whole piece on. Not to mention Joe Rogan, another voice you cited, has a $100M deal on a massive streaming platform that has gone out of its way to protect their investment in beaming new episodes of his influential show out on their service that connetcts to users of all age/race groups.

    As much as Republicans complain about victim complexes for those on the left, it’s hard to understand how voices that are heard daily/weekly by millions (and outrate many of the CNN/MSNBC shows) are stifled. They are the establishment, just as prominent liberals are and as prominent centrists are. Next you’ll tell me Christians are a marganilized group in America despite an overwhelming history protecting that faith as the predominant one in the country, not to mention the Christian beliefs influencing the highest court in the land now in charge of laws in our country.

    You can knock Stern for what you feel are misinformed, shallow and/or reckless opinions and there’s a discussion to be had there, but if we’re to truly believe none of what he said bothered you on a personal level, then it’s silly for you to suggest the reason he needs to change his personal opinions are to be your definition of more “unpredictable.” If he feels the way he does, you want him to say otherwise for ratings? He’s made his money to great & continued success just like many voices on the right have. I might disagree with them, but I’d never makes my argument for why they should feel differently be, “It would be more interesting content.”

    Not everything in media will appeal to me, and as consumers, we have the ability to make that choice. Stern has made riches with his fans, just as Rogan, Barstool, Maher, Don Lemon, Hannity and any other successful media voice has with theirs. They could all change their content and appeal to more people, or even just make more headlines as Stern has with your story that is trending #1 on this site currently, which doesn’t help your case that he isn’t good for making a splash anymore.

  2. Daniel Renken

    May 23, 2022 at 11:01 am

    That’s just the thing… after a while, it’s no longer unpredictable. Same s#it, different day. It simply gets old, just like we all do…

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BNM Writers

Is Nielsen Still a Necessity?

Even if radio companies don’t outright cut Nielsen’s PPM service, they should at least demand improvements to the system.

Andy Bloom

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A photo of an iPhone receiving an incoming call from Nielsen

Last January, Meruelo Media created a buzz when it announced that it would stop subscribing to Nielsen and its PPM rating service in Los Angeles.

At the time, “Inside Radio” report, “This means that ratings data for Meruelo’s four L.A. stations, KLOS (Rock), KPWR, Power 106 (Rhythmic CHR), KDAY (Classic Hip Hop), and KLLI, Cali 93.9 (Spanish CHR) will no longer appear in published ratings reports.

More significantly, Nielsen will no longer include listening data for Meruelo stations in the summary dataset that fuels the major buying systems used by agencies and advertisers per (Nielsen’s) Subscriber First policy adopted in 2020.” (“Inside Radio,” January 24, 2024).

As stated in the announcement, Meruelo’s Los Angeles radio stations did not appear in the published Holiday Ratings period.

When the announcement that Meruelo was forgoing Nielsen ratings was released, it made a certain amount of sense.

For the past 15 years, radio companies have been cutting expenses, no matter how much it has damaged the business’s long-term strategic viability.

Today, Nielsen is likely the largest expense on most radio stations’ balance sheets after payroll. Cutting Nielsen seemed inevitable. Was Merulo starting a trend?

However, with less fanfare, Meruelo’s stations were back in published reports for the January PPM release.

Apparently, Meruelo dropped the Holiday Book while negotiating a new deal. They found, ‘It’s just not feasible now to subscribe to Nielsen in a market the size of Los Angeles,” according to a person knowledgeable about the situation.

Is it time for the radio industry to reconsider its relationship with Nielsen Ratings?

At least one operator did so long ago. Ed Levine, President, and CEO of Galaxy Media Partners, which owns and operates radio stations in Syracuse and Utica-Rome, NY, parted with Arbitron, now Nielsen, 16 years ago. He’s never looked back and has no regrets.

Levine calls it “The great under-reported story of radio.”

He recalls Arbitron rolling out the PPM during the “Great Recession.”

“It added all this expense exactly as revenue collapsed,” he said.

Levine had a decision to make. He could either make numerous job cuts or drop the ratings service. “Locally based agencies know the stations,” he said. Businesses want to know how many people you got through my door,” Levine added.

He reflects on 16 years without Arbitron or Nielsen, “I can’t remember the last time a business asked for a ranker. Oh, you went from sixth to fourth 25 -to -54? Great,” he chuckles.

“Maybe it’s different in the biggest markets,” Levine concedes, “but I’ll bet there are a lot of markets, maybe 15 to 50, that could get along fine without Nielsen.”

At least one New York City station is finding out about life without Nielsen. Craig Karmazin’s Good Karma Brands also ended its relationship with Nielsen. In a Newsday interview with Neil Best, Karmazin said, “It’s outdated to use one form of media to measure a show, especially one that doesn’t reflect the entire listening audience and viewing audience across all the different ways we distribute our media now.”

Karmazin’s conclusion is consistent with Levine’s experience. New technologies provide the tools the sales department needs, according to Levine: “We can digitally show how many people heard a client’s spot or went to their website. Those are the analytics that matters.”

Even if radio companies don’t outright cut Nielsen’s PPM service, they should at least demand improvements to the system.

In the pre-PPM era, total ratings were Persons 12+. Today, the ratings are 6+. Who does this benefit?

Returning to 12+ would be a luxury, but is anybody selling 12-17-year-olds? Including kids and teens allows Nielsen to inflate the total sample size. Keeping the same sample size with panelists over 18 would be more instructive.

But don’t confuse the total sample for the daily in-tab. Most ratings analyses on which decisions are made use much smaller samples than users realize. I encourage reading Dr. Ed Cohen’s excellent and highly informational columns on Barrett News Media to understand how Nielsen’s “sausage” is made.

Some recent case studies suggest that 6+ ratings inflate total listening and give a distorted view of total market listening. There are instances where “kids” with meters pick up the listening of their mothers. Looking at 6 to 12, or even 6 to 18 demos, can often reveal strange patterns.

With access to some of the tools Nielsen makes available, interested parties can pinpoint the listening and see it’s coming from one household with a large number of meters.

Further, remember that panelists can remain in the sample for up to two years. While it may not happen frequently, it does occur. When a station suddenly tumbles out of nowhere, it’s often because it lost a heavy listening meter that had been in the sample for an extended period.

Electronic measurement promised that it would show increased listening. It was also supposed to be an economic boon by bringing packaged goods advertising to the radio broadcast industry. Both claims turned out to be dubious.

Nielsen Media Research declined to comment for this article.

These are just a few of the liabilities in the current PPM system. For the money spent, the radio industry deserves better.

Will the radio industry demand more from Nielsen, or as companies continue to cut, will more stations see Nielsen’s huge expense line and at least consider cutting it, too?

Galaxy Media Partners President and CEO Ed Levine sums up the argument for the radio industry to reevaluate its relationship with Nielsen Ratings:

“The great disconnect is linear radio ratings are tied to how things were in the 1980s and 90s, while the world and radio have changed. It’s comical that radio is now completely focused on digital revenue yet continues to pay huge dollars for a linear ratings service that has no way, despite their claims to accurately measure digital listening. It’s not about us anymore; it’s about them – the client – and how many folks we got to their website, into their store, and ultimately to buy their products,” he said.

“If the Big Three had decided not to renew with Nielsen ten years ago but rather to invest in local radio talent, the industry may have had a very different story over the past decade and face a brighter future today. The good news is that it’s not too late for the rest of us. Smarten up and invest resources where everything is flowing, not where it was in 1994.” 

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BNM Writers

Julia Boorstin Has Shaped the Discussion on CNBC For Nearly Two Decades

“After covering the Facebook IPO, I realized we needed a better structure at CNBC to talk about fast moving, disruptive startups before they went public.”

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A photo of Julia Boorstin and the CNBC logo
(Photo: CNBC)

Senior Reporter, Author, and Change Maker. For nearly 18 years Julia Boorstin has graced the airwaves of CNBC covering media and technology. But she’s innovated so much more including the outlet’s annual ‘Disruptor’ list and their new ‘Changemakers’ list.

“I just love being able to be entrepreneurial within this big organization.” Boorstin said over a Zoom call, adding, “The fact that I’ve been here for so long is really a testament to the fact that I’ve been able to create things and build things, and partner with my colleagues and feel like we’re building valuable things together.”

Straight out of college, Boorstin got her first gig as a reporter at Fortune Magazine. “I had a really great luck to work with great editors there who really trained me, on everything. Not just how to write a profile thousands of words long on a CEO, but also really how to read documents and balance sheets and dig into the numbers.”

She added, “I sort of think that I got a thorough business school boot camp of sorts, working with legendary editors, including Carol Loomis who is an amazing editor and role model.”

While at Fortune, Boorstin appeared as a contributor on CNN. She said of the time, “I was only 22 years old, and I thought it was kind of crazy to be on live television. But I didn’t get nervous. Because of my ability to be quick and fast on my feet, they asked me back to become a contributor. So I became a contributor to CNN and CNN Headline News.”

Joining CNBC in 2006, the Princeton graduate was a general assignment reporter before being given a choice of working a media beat or a retail beat. “I’d done various stories in both of those areas at the time and the media industry was really starting to transform.” Boorstin added, “We were seeing the rise of YouTube and Netflix as a force. We were also seeing the emergence of these powerful social platforms, like Facebook. So I said, ‘Media seems really interesting. There’s a lot of change and transformation. I really want to cover this beat.’”

In 2007, Boorstin moved to L.A. to focus on media.

With technology changing the media, Boorstin has also developed a passion for reporting on Artificial Intelligence. “In the past year and a half or so, since the launch of ChatGPT, I’ve been really focused on trying to report on how AI is going to impact and disrupt all of these different sectors.”

“I think the industry, the entertainment industry is going to be very careful, mostly because [AI] does threaten a lot of jobs and was the source of a lot of concern around the actors and writers strikes last year,” she later added. “So there are legal concerns, but there are also just structural concerns.”

One of those “structural concerns” is protecting intellectual property (IP). “How do we experiment with AI in a way that’s not going to expose our IP to these models? We don’t want our content being used by these models and then used by other people down the road. So there’s sort of the legal concerns of protecting IP and not violating their deals with the actors and writers,” Boorstin said.

Over the years, the veteran reporter has witnessed many evolutions in the media space. In turn, it transformed her reporting.

“After covering the Facebook IPO, I realized we needed a better structure at CNBC to talk about fast-moving, disruptive startups before they went public.”

She went on to say, “Around the time of the Facebook IPO, I proposed to my bosses that we should create a Disruptor 50 list. We should create a list of the 50 fastest-growing private companies and put it in the language that is relevant to our viewers and say, ‘Either these companies are going to be the next public giants, or they are already disrupting the current public giants.’”

This May will be the 12th annual Disruptor 50 list.

A new list debuting on CNBC this year is another Boorstin pitch: ‘Changemakers.’

“The idea of Changemakers is to talk about women who are transforming business. It’s an annual list. We just launched our first one. It’s 50 women. It is unranked because we are not interested in ranking women,” she shared.

“We just want to highlight their success stories. And these women vary across industries, but they also vary from women who you’ve heard of, like Taylor Swift and Naomi Osaka, to women who are maybe accomplishing things that you’re less familiar with.”

While Boorstin did not make her own list, she has made a huge impact on CNBC and the way media is covered. Her advice to those looking to follow in her footsteps is, “You don’t know what you’re going to like doing or what you’re good at unless you try it. The industry that I’m covering now didn’t even really exist 20 years ago. So I think it’s just important to be open to trying different things. I didn’t know that I would fall in love with business news, until I was a year or two in at Fortune Magazine.”

Boorstin went on to say, “I think looking back at all the women I interviewed for my book and the women ChangeMakers, but also the men I interview is that no one succeeds without a growth mindset. I really increasingly see a growth mindset is just the combination of confidence that you can keep on learning and changing. Whether it’s a personal scale of leadership or the actual like the content itself, that we all need to have that confidence that we can keep learning and changing and growing.”

She added, “Also the humility that we don’t already know everything, we’re not going to naturally be good and all the things. We need to not feel discouraged when, when stuff gets hard, but also just know what sort of part of the process.”

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BNM Writers

Understanding the Nielsen PPM Control Panel Report — Part 2

There’s one item that I didn’t mention last week.

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A photo of a line graph with the Nielsen logo

Last week, I took you through the first few reports of your monthly PPM Control Panel Report, one of the most useful Nielsen tools available. Let’s resume the quest to give you some insight into how I use the CPR.

There’s one item that I didn’t mention last week. Nielsen includes a pretty simple “How-to-Read” at the bottom of each analysis. These can be helpful if you aren’t sure about what you’re viewing or if you don’t have all of my columns handy!

Let’s pick up with the “Quarter Hours Contributed in Subsequent Months” from the station’s top ten panelists. There are two versions of this chart. The first is from six surveys ago moving forward and the next chart does it in reverse, using the current survey and working five surveys back.

In both cases, you’ll see a series of lines covering the last six monthlies with the months on the X (horizontal) axis and the number of quarter hours on the Y (vertical) axis. The first chart can be extremely disappointing at times because you may have had a heavy-listening panelist who suddenly disappeared. You can see that if the line stops after a survey. No more line means that panelist is no longer in the panel and too many of those types of lines tend to raise alcohol sales among program directors. 

In other cases, the line may head down to the bottom of the chart along the horizontal axis. In that case, the panelist is still in the panel, but didn’t listen to the station.

While Nielsen doesn’t designate the demos of these panelists in this chart, you can find them by using the next table. For the first chart, you’ll have to go back to the CPR for that month.

The “Top 25 Listeners Six Month Trend” slide has always been one of my favorites. You get to see the top 25 panelists for the station you’re analyzing (I’m not assuming that you’re always looking at the ones you oversee) and you get specific information, such as age, sex, and ethnicity. 

You’ll see exactly how many quarter hours were credited from that individual during the 28 days (although you don’t know how many days they were intab). Nielsen conveniently tells you what percentage of their listening was to the station and of course, anything 50% and up is a P1. 

Finally, you’ll see an average weight. The top ten panelists in the table are the ones that appear as lines in the earlier chart I discussed above.

We’ve talked about weighting in the past and with PPM, weighting for a panelist is different every day because the panel is never exactly the same. You can smile when you see a heavy listening panelist to one of your stations with a well above average weight. Of course, if you’re after 25-54 like so many stations, all those 55+ types (like me) in the top 25 are pretty useless to you. 

You’ll also see when new panelists among the top 25 join the panel. Those are the ones with blanks in some of the months. The newest panelists will have quarter hours (and percentages and weights) for just the current month which puts you in a quandary. 

Was this panelist in the panel for five days, ten days, or 25 days? Who knows, although you can ask your Nielsen rep to find out. If their pattern holds, they should provide more quarter hours the next month having a full 28 days in the panel. 

When I used to look at these charts, I would typically count up how many of the top ten and top 25 were in the target demo and it was always a case of “the more, the merrier”. But be sure to look at the weights which you can compare with the next chart.

This next slide has two very useful charts, the “Market Average Weight” and the “Market Unweighted Avg. Quarter Hour Count.” You can look at your (or your competitor’s) heaviest listening panelists’ weights and compare to the market average. 

A tip: the market average may be a bit higher than your station will have because it’s based on P6+. Kids 6-11 are notorious for not carrying meters which means their weights can be sky high from time to time. Since no one really cares about this demo, I’d knock the market average down just a bit if you want to compare it to the average of your panelists.

The unweighted average quarter-hour count is important because that gives you an idea about how much radio listening is actually taking place in your market. While we’re all wringing our hands about the direction of our business, you can see trends in real radio usage. 

Again, the keyword is “unweighted”, so a weighted number might be different, but comparing this number’s direction to your station’s direction is useful.

The CPR has a lot to it and this tutorial will continue, so let’s meet again next week.

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