Four Victorians named for inaugural tour February 28, Category: News ,. Recent Posts 12 November, No products in the cart. U18 Team. WBBL Club. Nicole Faltum. Melbourne Stars. Hayley Silver-Holmes subject to fitness. Annabel Sutherland. T ayla Vlaeminck. The company grew slowly, making only three acquisitions in the s. The Telecommunications Act of loosened media ownership rules and set off an acquisition frenzy, even by Entercom.
Like Comcast, Entercom expanded. Comcast had some advantages along the way — people were paying for TV, and Comcast had a legal monopoly in many markets. Radio companies never enjoyed those luxuries. He was a Philly kid. I was a Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd kind of guy. And a zillion Phillies, Flyers, Sixers and Eagles games. The Eagles were having a this-could-be-it season, on the way to the Super Bowl. I love the business. I love the power of how a really good personality on the air can connect with audiences.
He became president in , took the company public in , ascended to CEO in , and maintained a low profile around town the whole time. He never really considered Entercom a Philadelphia story, until now. Comcast has its skyline-defining skyscrapers.
Entercom is on the fourth floor of the new Aramark building, still kind of anonymous but at least downtown. Comcast has a gigantic white sphere you can go inside to watch a degree movie about the power of ideas, created by Steven Spielberg. Entercom has this trapezoid-shaped video screen where I watch Bono and the Edge from U2 performing at the Mix On the day of my visit, there are occasional loudly vibrating power tools.
Leaving them behind is another way to put the past in the rearview mirror. The new building represents the future and all the changes Entercom is making to get there. I get a tour of the facilities from Sarah Harris, vice president of social impact, and David Yadgaroff, senior VP and market manager for the Philly stations.
Entercom is adding around 80 employees to reach in Philly. We walk past studios with heavy soundproof doors, podcast-recording rooms, the under-construction KYW newsroom.
I grill Yadgaroff on key changes Entercom has made at the Philly stations. It felt like the right thing to do. Both bring in huge ratings. Nationally, sports is a major chunk of the future for Entercom. Its stations carry games for 44 pro teams and engage millions of listeners, men who seem to have a lot of time to debate wide receivers. Legalized sports betting and newly generic male-helper pills are seeking them as customers. When a wispy flurry came down in early November, I reflexively tuned to , and its airwaves seemed to buzz with extra energy.
News-radio stations are under siege by everything from electronic billboards that inform motorists to navigation apps that make traffic reports obsolete. By the last quarter of , the company reported that same-station revenue was up for the first time since the merger. But the stock kept sliding. Yadgaroff, a holdover from CBS, says Entercom did new market research as soon as it took over.
That was the first time I had seen data like that about our stations. When we pass a roomful of servers and communications gear, Yadgaroff explains how radio is much more now than a DJ with a microphone.
They record podcasts. I monkeyed with the mobile app during a minute train ride in early November, to taste the future. In a sense, Radio. It has local stations from Entercom and other broadcasters — more than in all. I suggest to J. Thanks to its many commercials, Radio. Podcasts are distributed everywhere for free, so the benefit to owning them is selling embedded commercials. But podcasts are far less dense with ads than traditional radio, and they have evolved with a much softer-sell approach than the typical annoying radio ad.
Eventually 5G, or some bigger G, may kill FM and its limited range as a way to send sound through the sky.
The technology era that birthed Entercom will end. Then comes the question: Will terrestrial radio, like human beings fleeing Earth for our next planet, successfully make the leap to thrive in the futuristic new habitat? Or will all of radio be left behind, a fading backwater with an aging listener base, like AM is already? Field is confident Entercom is well-positioned for whatever happens. For all the changes that have happened in how we consume audio, he points out, 90 percent of radio listening still happens over broadcast.
There was other news: Entercom had cut its dividend and planned to use the savings to help pay down debt. Entercom feels good about — as do most media outlets, because political ad spending will be bonkers.
As Field spoke, the stock started rising.
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