Why a Santa Rosa radio station is making waves

KSRO’s move last month to replace the 3-to-6 p.m. weekday time slot held for 15 years by local broadcaster Steve Jaxon with a conservative talk show was a decision made from economic necessity, according to station ownership.

“We were losing between $200,000 and $250,000 a year by running (Jaxon’s) show,” said Michael O’Shea, president and general manager of Amaturo Sonoma Media Group, parent company to KSRO. Additionally, the station is still recovering from the pandemic, which caused the media industry at large to lose advertising dollars while the world was shut down.

By canceling “The Drive with Steve Jaxon,” KSRO also was in the position to let go three people attached to the show, O’Shea said.

“So, it was a financial decision, partly,” O’Shea said, “but bigger than that was a two-year decision to reflect the atmosphere and the curiosity and the interest about what’s going to happen going into the national election.”

Jaxon’s program was replaced with “The Joe Pags Show,” a nationally syndicated conservative talk show out of San Antonio, Texas.

The Pags show might be familiar to KSRO’s longtime listeners. The Santa Rosa station carried it up until about five years ago, but it was aired in delay and later in the evening to accommodate the Jaxon show, said Jim Murphy, vice president of programming and operations for Amaturo Sonoma Media Group.

“We didn't have a place at that time in the lineup to carry (Pags) live, but certainly, from a syndicator’s availability standpoint, it was and is available for a station on the West Coast to take live from 3-to-6 p.m. Pacific (time),” Murphy said.

Airing another conservative talk show fits with KSRO’s existing model, which is a mix of news and talk — part local and part syndication, O’Shea said.

“We're still that way,” he said.

Even so, O’Shea has been in the business long enough — more than 50 years — to have anticipated the backlash that would come from dropping a longtime and popular local show that was liberal in nature, especially in Democratic-leaning Sonoma County.

KSRO has received approximately 15 calls and letters from angry listeners in response to dropping the Jaxon show — not all that many, O’Shea said.

“I've done a lot of talk programming, from Dallas to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Chicago, and that is the reaction you get no matter if you break a fingernail,” he said. “It's the loud minority, as opposed to the silent majority. They’re going to be active (and) they're going to be vitriolic if you disturb anything that's in their wheelhouse.”

And O’Shea is fully aware of the political preferences of KSRO’s listeners.

“We realize Sonoma County is one of the most left-leaning counties in California. There’s certainly no doubt about that,” he said. “We went back and tracked the last three national elections, and we saw (from the Registrar of Voters office) that Sonoma County was typically 67% Democratic.”

That data is “like a blinding flash of the obvious,” but there is a problem on the supply side, O’Shea said.

And a national expert agrees.

“There are very few center-left-leaning talk show hosts left in the radio industry these days,” said Dan Shelley, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Radio Television Digital News Association. “It has almost always been the case since the advent of conservative talk radio, which exploded after Rush Limbaugh became a thing in the 1980s, that most talk radio is conservative.”

The outlier was Air America, which featured the likes of Al Franken and Rachel Maddow. The liberal-leaning syndicated offering began in 2004 and shuttered in 2010.

“Air America tried it and others have tried progressive talk,” Shelley said. “It's just not an economic success.”

Ratings are the name of the game in the radio industry. That’s what draws advertisers. But there has been a shift in their priorities.

Advertisers’ once-coveted age 25-54 demographic has largely gone digital. The older population, now primarily the baby boomers, are still tuning in to AM radio, and ratings research shows they have some appetite for conservative talk programming, according to both O’Shea and Shelley.

In Sonoma County, it will be a few months before O’Shea knows how replacing Jaxon with Pags impacts KSRO’s ratings.

O’Shea receives ratings-survey data every month for the three months’ prior, he said, but there’s a lag. KSRO made its programming change in June, so he’ll get the July report shortly. It will reflect April, May and June.

“The pure statistical reliability will probably start showing itself in middle-to-end of August, and probably in September we'll have 100% of the survey,” he said.