Clear Channel’s IHeartRadio.com has soft launched News, Traffic, and Weather channels for 20 markets.
Branded under the “24/7 News” banner, the channels feature a repeating loop of news headlines, weather forecasts, and traffic reports from Clear Channel’s Metro Networks and Total Traffic subsidiares.
The list of markets currently live are: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington DC.
They make these links sort of hard to find. On my Android app, I don’t see it at all. On the website site, it’s one of a series of “featured stations” that rotate on the home page display. If you are not on the home page at the right time, you don’t see it. For both, the channels are not listed under their respective cities (with terrestrial stations), which is where I’d expect to find them.
The voices on the loop do not sound major market. The news report is pretty skimpy. And I have to wonder how often they update the recorded traffic report.
Also the strange part is that why would CC put local 24/7 News on Iheartradio. I see that there are cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, Seattle and Atlanta. Why would CC Market all-news to these markets in areas where an OTA all-news station from Cumulus, CBS and Hubbard are well established and where the audience in these markets would demand more local updates and content. Incidentally WYAY-FM is still attempting to build an audience in the Atlanta Market. I can understand if Clear Channel National 24/7 News Feed is an attempt to compete against TRN’s ARNN Political News in areas where there are no all-news stations to provide local content. But CC is either trying to prepare for a time when Rush retires or when Talk goes away.
Its about creating unique content for IHeartRadio, nothing more while using the resources Clear Channel already has in-house.
How is ARNN doing. I know its the TRN Operation all-news politics operation that airs for 14-hours weekdays in some markets in a 30 minute or 1 hour cycles. I looked at the stations list in the ARNN site but they sent me to the Sales page for TRN. I tried to look for the list of affiliates corresponding to the Ratings on competing sites but with no luck. But when I look at CC News 24/7 and its local editions they tend to balance between entertainment and other national news, but on some feeds weather and traffic. News 24/7 runs on a 15 minute cycle, Local editions on a 2-5 minute cycle. Is Fox News Radio contract with CC going to Expire in 2013? Also How is CC Iheart News 24/7 and ARNN going to rake ratings and revenue. How do we know its not going to be like Merlin’s screw-up in NYC and Chicago. I know in NYC’s case they were killed off by CBS O&O’s WCBS-AM and WINS-AM. In Chicago Merlin all-news was Killed off by WBBM-AM and WGN-AM. Or in the 1970’s when NBC Radio had NIS but the problem then was that when it entered big cities like San Francisco on KNAI-FM 99.7 they were killed off by KCBS-AM and KGO-AM mainly because the big cities demanded more local content in their newscasts.
Please use line breaks inbetween separate questions. It’s very hard to read in one jumbled block.
All of these services are filling different goals. ARNN is syndicated content meant to be used as you mentioned. Clear Channel’s are just web streams meant to target mobile listeners who want a quick news fix in a short period of time. As a mobile only service it doesn’t need to worry about ratings, its there to keep people on the IHeart platform.
There’s no comparison between networks like those and Merlin’s failed stations, nor the old NBC NIS service which was in a different era with different issues.