Air America

» see airamerica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By 2004 American talk radio had been a one-sided argument for fifteen years. The AM band belonged to conservative hosts with national syndication deals, and the people who wanted an argument back kept being told there was no audience for one. Air America Radio was built to test that, and it went on the air at noon Eastern on 31 March 2004, out of leased airtime at WLIB in New York.

The first afternoon ran Al Franken at noon under the title The O'Franken Factor, with Randi Rhodes at three. The evening belonged to Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder. The lineup was assembled out of comedians and writers rather than radio people, which was both the appeal and, eventually, part of the problem.

The money was wrong from the first month. Within a year the network was in the news over nearly a million dollars in loans that an executive had quietly taken from a Boys & Girls Club in New York. The loans were paid back and the damage was not. Debts forced a Chapter 11 filing in October 2006, and in March 2007 the New York property investor Stephen L. Green bought the whole network with his brother Mark for $4.25 million.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who came out of it ~

What survived is the roster. Franken left his show in February 2007 to run for the Senate in Minnesota and won. Rachel Maddow took her show to television at MSNBC. Thom Hartmann, who had 1.5 to 2 million unique listeners a week in 2008, left in part over what he called the network's merry-go-round management, and said afterward that he had done better since.

The strangest inheritance is Marc Maron's. His morning show was broken up in December 2005 and his contract was allowed to lapse; his last broadcast was on 16 December. After the network died he got into the empty studios without permission and recorded there, which is how WTF started. One of the most listened-to interview shows of the next decade began inside the corpse.

~ the signal problem ~

The ratings were never the disaster the obituaries implied, and they were never good either. In Arbitron's spring 2008 book, stations running mostly Air America programming averaged a 1.3 share. KPOJ in Portland managed 3.7 and WXXM in Madison 3.5, while the flagship WWRL in New York sat at 0.5. By October 2008 the network counted 66 terrestrial stations, 32 of which carried most of the schedule, and it had lost 63 affiliates in its first four and a half years. The commentator Alan Colmes gave the structural reason: conservatives already held the heritage stations, so progressive hosts were put on weaker signals that could not compete without heavy promotion and years of patience, and got neither.

The AM band will always be out of reach from here. Air America's whole fight was conducted over American broadcast licenses, on signals that stop at a coastline, and no Turkish radio dial has anything to compare it to. What I had in 2004 was a TTNet line in Ankara, and every argument worth following was happening in forum threads.

~ the last broadcast ~

On 21 January 2010 the company announced it would cease programming immediately and file for Chapter 7. The statement it left on its own site blamed what it called a perfect storm in the media industry, pointing at the Citadel Broadcasting bankruptcy and at the closure of Radio & Records, the trade paper that had covered the business for decades. The feed carried reruns through the weekend and ended at nine o'clock on Monday night, 25 January. Bennett Zier was the last chief executive, and his job by then was the liquidation.

Somebody still owns the name. Newsweb Corporation, which runs the Chicago progressive talk station WCPT, picked up the trademarks at some point after the closure. airamerica.com still answers today. Four kilobytes of page, a line declaring Air America a registered trademark of Heartland Signal LLC, and a redirect to that Chicago station.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »