Alex Mercer: Tell me if this reads wrong to you — a morning show gets cancelled, the hosts are well-liked, the audience is upset, and the reason is basically: we couldn't enter the value into a spreadsheet.
Jordan Hale: That's — yeah, that reads very right and also very bleak.
Alex Mercer: It's what happened at 106.5 The End. Jason Barsky and Rayne — previous hosts of The Wake Up Call — replaced due to budget cuts. The show wasn't tanking. The budget math just didn't work in their favor.
Jordan Hale: Okay wait, I want to sit with that for a second, because — and maybe this is too obvious — but that's not a story about a bad decision. That's a story about what happens when you can measure one thing clearly and can't measure the other thing at all, you know? Cost is right there. Loyalty is... somewhere.
Alex Mercer: That's the reframe I think we need to hold onto all episode. It's not cost versus quality. It's measurable versus unmeasurable.
Jordan Hale: And the place where that gap is most expensive is the morning drive window — 6 to 10 a.m. — because that's not just when people listen, that's when radio can actually charge a premium for it.
Alex Mercer: Highest-value advertising daypart in commercial radio. Which makes The Wake Up Call — Gavin Ferguson and Katie Beers on 106.5 The End — the right lens, because that show lives and dies in exactly that window.
Jordan Hale: So what are we actually trying to answer here — like, is local programming worth what it costs, or is the problem that we've been asking the wrong question the whole time?
Alex Mercer: Both, maybe. And Bob Pittman's argument makes it harder — because he's saying technology solves the problem. Distribute quality talent across markets, smaller stations get better programming, nobody has to hire locally. That argument is coherent.
Jordan Hale: It's coherent in a way that, like, worries me more than if it were obviously wrong, you know? An obviously bad argument you can fight. A coherent one that might be missing something — that's the harder conversation.
Alex Mercer: Which is basically the question. If local programming actually outperformed syndication on the numbers that matter, stations would choose it. They keep not choosing it. So either they're making a systematic mistake — or the value is real but invisible to the metrics they're using.
Jordan Hale: And I genuinely don't know which one is scarier.
Alex Mercer: The scarier one is probably that the value is real and we're just measuring wrong. Because if stations are making a systematic mistake, someone figures that out and corrects it. But if the metric itself is broken — that just keeps running.
Jordan Hale: And that's — yeah, that's the analogy I can't shake. Like, you know the difference between a chain coffee shop and the diner where the owner knows your order? You can get coffee anywhere. But you go back to the diner because of the person behind the counter. And that loyalty is completely real — it just doesn't show up in the diner's quarterly report.
Alex Mercer: That's actually the cleanest version of it. Local radio is the diner.
Jordan Hale: Right — and the chain can replicate the coffee, but it cannot replicate the person who already knows you take yours with oat milk and you're running late on Tuesdays. That specific knowledge is the thing. And for someone in Sacramento, Gavin Ferguson and Katie Beers on The Wake Up Call are that person. You're not tuning in for the music. You're tuning in because there's an inside joke from three weeks ago that you've been following, and today might be the day it pays off.
Alex Mercer: And that listener has a name in the industry — a P1 listener. Highly engaged, calls in, texts in, posts. And the gap isn't small: they generate roughly five times the quarter hours of someone who just has radio on in the background.
Alex Mercer: Five times. That's not a rounding difference. That's a structurally different listener.
Jordan Hale: And those are the people who, like — wait, no, this is the part that actually breaks my brain a little — those are the people you can't import. You can't just drop a national personality into Sacramento and expect that listener to transfer their loyalty over. Because the P1 in Sacramento built that attachment to Gavin and Katie specifically. That's not transferable.
Alex Mercer: The Kevin Nguyen thing makes that concrete. He joined The Wake Up Call as an intern in 2013. Over years, he becomes a full on-air member. That's not a hire. That's an accumulation — of references, of market knowledge, of inside history with the audience.
Jordan Hale: You cannot ship that to another market. Like, you can't FedEx eleven years of Tuesday-morning bits about Sacramento traffic to a station in Phoenix and expect it to land.
Alex Mercer: Which is basically the scarcity principle in plain English — a national stream delivers the same songs everywhere, but what Gavin Ferguson and Katie Beers do on 106.5 The End exists on exactly one signal. That's the thing you can't replicate.
Jordan Hale: And the uncomfortable part is that stations know this — I mean, the P1 research exists, Radio Content Pro has frameworks built around exactly this — and they're still cutting local shows. So either the math genuinely doesn't close, or we're valuing the wrong thing entirely.
Alex Mercer: And yet — stations keep cutting anyway. Which means the math doesn't close, or something stranger is happening. Syndication isn't just cheaper. It wins every metric that actually shows up in a budget. Per-market staffing, gone. Full local production team, gone. Consistent professional output, still there. The savings land in the P&L this quarter. Not next year, not in some lagging ratings report — this quarter.
Jordan Hale: Right — but what does local loyalty show up as? Like, genuinely, if you're a program director—
Alex Mercer: Anecdotes. Ratings, six months later. Listener texts that don't fit a slide deck.
Jordan Hale: Picture this. You're sitting across from ownership and you're trying to explain why you should keep paying for Gavin and Katie when a nationally syndicated feed costs a fraction of that. What do you even say? 'Trust me, the P1s love them'? That argument requires like three inferential steps before you get to a dollar figure.
Alex Mercer: And the local advertising premium is the one place where it should be legible. Local personalities — Gavin Ferguson, Katie Beers — can charge more for client endorsements because that trust is specific and community-embedded. Generic syndicated content cannot generate that at the same price point. That's real money.
Jordan Hale: That's the thing though — is it actually showing up clearly enough? Because that chain of reasoning is: community trust leads to listener loyalty, loyalty leads to higher engagement, higher engagement justifies premium ad rates. That's three links. A spreadsheet wants one.
Alex Mercer: That's basically the asymmetry. The loyalty argument is persuasive in theory and undefended in data. And I think that's not a small problem — that's exactly why it keeps losing.
Jordan Hale: Which is wild when you think about the specific mechanics that actually build those P1s. Like, 'War of the Roses,' 'Second Date Update' — those recurring bits aren't just entertainment, they're the thing that makes someone pull over to text in. That's a measurable action. And we still can't connect it cleanly to a revenue line?
Alex Mercer: I mean, the persistence of syndication is itself a signal. If local reliably outperformed on the numbers that ownership sees, market competition would have sorted that out. The Steve Harvey Morning Show doesn't spread to market after market because program directors are confused. It spreads because the cost math wins the room.
Jordan Hale: No, that's — yeah, that's the uncomfortable version of it. The market's not broken. It's just optimizing for the thing it can see.
Alex Mercer: Right — and what comes next makes this harder, not easier. The hybrid strategies and what streaming is doing to the justification for local investment — that's where the tension stops being theoretical.
Jordan Hale: Yeah and I don't — I genuinely don't know if the hybrid answer fixes anything or just papers over the gap. Because WBMX running the Steve Harvey Morning Show with local traffic and weather dropped in — is that a solution, or is that just what losing slowly looks like?
Alex Mercer: That's — I think that's the right frame. WBMX running the Steve Harvey Morning Show with local traffic drops isn't a hybrid strategy. It's a hedge. And a hedge is what you make when you don't actually believe either option fully.
Jordan Hale: Wait, say that again — because that's actually a different claim than 'hybrids are a compromise.'
Alex Mercer: A compromise implies you're getting some of both. A hedge implies you don't trust either side enough to commit. And if that's what WBMX is doing — layering local weather and contesting over a national feed — you're not creating scarcity. You're diluting two things that each had a reason to exist.
Jordan Hale: Oh, that's — yeah, okay. Because the listener at 6:47 a.m. isn't getting the full Steve Harvey experience, and they're not getting, like, a Gavin Ferguson who knows their city. They're getting... a weather break. That's what local became.
Alex Mercer: And that's actually where streaming makes this much worse. Spotify and Apple Music have already commoditized the music. The songs are everywhere, on demand. So the one thing radio still has — the genuinely non-replicable thing — is local personality. That's the moat.
Jordan Hale: And the hybrid strategy protects almost none of it. You know, like — a traffic break isn't a moat. A traffic break is a feature. You can get traffic on your phone.
Alex Mercer: Right. So the industry's answer to 'streaming took our music advantage' was apparently... add a local weather insert. That's not closing the gap. That's adjacent to the gap.
Jordan Hale: And wait — no, this is the part that I can't fully get my head around — does anyone actually know if hybrids work? Like, does WBMX know if that decision performed better than going fully local or fully syndicated would have?
Alex Mercer: No empirical data. That's the hardest fact in all of this. The industry has been running the hybrid experiment for years and cannot tell you whether it outperforms full local or full syndication on ratings or ad revenue. There's no controlled answer.
Alex Mercer: None. Which means the hedge isn't even an informed hedge. It's a structural decision made without the measurement tools to evaluate the decision. That's not a research gap — that's a window into how the industry actually operates.
Jordan Hale: So Radio Content Pro is out there saying local specificity drives P1s, the P1 data is real, and meanwhile stations are layering local contesting over Steve Harvey and nobody's actually checked if it's working. That's — I mean, that's not a measurement problem anymore. That's something else.
Alex Mercer: It's a decision-making culture that moved faster than its own feedback loop. And with radio's overall audience declining — the revenue base shrinking — there's even less slack to run the experiment properly. So the hybrid persists not because it's proven but because nobody can afford to find out.
Jordan Hale: And in the meantime streaming keeps commoditizing the music, the moat gets narrower, and the thing that was supposed to bridge the gap — local inserts over a national show — might actually be the thing that signals to listeners that local radio gave up on being local.
Alex Mercer: And that might be — I keep turning this over — that might be the actual endpoint. Not one side winning. Radio just... contracts until the only stations that can afford Gavin Ferguson and Katie Beers are the ones already profitable enough to absorb the cost. Localism becomes a luxury. Not a competitive tool. A luxury.
Jordan Hale: That's a brutal way to land it. And also I think it's probably right.
Alex Mercer: The thing I can't resolve is the measurement loop closing on itself. The Wake Up Call — Gavin, Katie, Kevin Nguyen who started as an intern in 2013 — that's not just a show. That's years of accumulated identity, specific to one city, built across a decade. It disappears in a single budget cycle. And then whatever replaces it gets evaluated by the same metrics that failed to capture the value before it was cut.
Jordan Hale: The same broken ruler, measuring the new thing.
Alex Mercer: Yeah. And you can't un-cut it. Once Jason Barsky and Rayne were gone, that was gone. You can't walk that back when the ratings tell you six months later that maybe you miscalculated.
Jordan Hale: I don't know — I genuinely don't know — whether that makes the industry tragic or just honest about what markets actually do. Like, it's not malicious. It's just... the thing you can see winning over the thing you can't prove.
Alex Mercer: That's probably where I'm going to leave this sitting. Not a verdict. Just — that's the shape of it.
Jordan Hale: Good conversation to sit with. Thanks for thinking through it with me, even when we couldn't close it.
