(Photo credit: Muhammed ÖÇAL, Unsplash.com.)
This past summer, me—along with many others—said goodbye to my alma mater. My radio alma mater, that is.
CHML, broadcasting at 900 khz on the AM dial from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, shut down operations for good on August 14, 2024 at approximately 12 noon after almost 97 years of continuous broadcasting. This came as a shock to many Hamiltonians—including those working at the station.
There was no grand announcement that such an event was about to take place. Newsman Paul Tipple did his final newscast at 9:30am and announced the next newscast coming up at 10:00am. Except that newscast didn’t happen. The music bed that usually plays underneath the newscast played out at the time by way of computer automation (a popular way to cut costs in the radio business), but no actual person was in the studio to keep listeners up to date on the current events of the hour. The staff were reportedly told that the station was being shut down effective immediately and were escorted out of the building. Some staff members that weren’t working at the time were cruelly informed of their recent unemployment status by reading about the station’s closure on social media.
The station chugged along like this for about a couple of hours until a disembodied male voice came on and informed listeners that the station was shutting down due to declining revenues over many years. (The voice was presumably that of a Corus Entertainment executive, the company that owned the station). The voice then thanked listeners and advertisers for their loyalty over the years before finally going dark. (Ironically, 21 years to the day of the big blackout that crippled a good portion of Canada and the U.S. for about a whole day in many parts).
I didn’t actually hear it live (although you can hear CHML’s final moments on YouTube, which was posted there shortly after it occurred), but I did read about it almost immediately online. Bad news travels fast.
My initial reaction? It came as somewhat of a surprise, but I wouldn’t say it was a shock. The reason I say that is because anyone who has been following Corus’ bleak financial picture, as I had, knew that the company had been bleeding red ink for quite some time. Multiple cutbacks had been rippling throughout the Corus chain, and shutting down stations (particularly AM) has become a way of life in Canada and the U.S., so it wasn’t unforeseeable that something like this would eventually occur.
Alan Cross, who was Program Director of Y108 (CHML’s FM sister station), had noted on his blog A Journal of Musical Things that CHML was already suffering from revenue challenges when he arrived at the station in 2001. I suspect it was even longer than that, given the rather paltry paycheques that were being paid out to myself and some of my other hard-working colleagues from about a little over 30 years ago when I worked there (despite semi-promises from management that we would be the first to benefit from any good fortune coming the station’s way). The fact that both stations engaged in multiple firing sprees during the 1990s—despite doing reasonably well in the ratings—would confirm this unfortunate state of affairs.
Although CHML was plagued by a lot of clueless programming decisions during the later part of the decade, it was not enough to sink the heritage station with its long-standing reputation in the community, at least not right away.
CHML, during its audience peak (around the time that I worked there) was Hamilton’s “Hometown Radio” station. And that wasn’t just some sunny slogan; CHML lived up to that reputation in spades. The station’s personalities were always out and about in the community, talking to regular everyday people, as well as letting their opinions being heard with great talk shows hosted by Roy Green, John Hardy and Bill Kelly, as well as other talented and knowledgeable hosts in the years to come. They followed in the great tradition of the station’s legends that came before, like Paul Hanover (who had been the “Mayor of the Morning” for almost 40 years), Tom Cherington, Lee Dunbar, Bob Hooper…the list goes on and on.
But radio is a business, and like all businesses, cutbacks have to occur from time to time, which can either make or break a company. CHML, like many other radio stations across North America, appeared to take the latter path.
As the purse strings tightened up and penny-pinching became the order of the day, CHML started to cut back on local content and started importing syndicated talk shows from Toronto (many from their sister station AM 640) and from south of the border. They would continue to trumpet the “Hometown Radio” slogan, but little by little, listeners weren’t buying it and started to trickle away.
As the shift away from local programming continued, they eventually dropped that slogan in favor of “Hamilton’s News/Talk Station” (and later on, “Global News Radio”, as many stations in the Corus chain were branded). That would sustain them for a little while, but with the internet boom happening at the beginning of the millennium, listeners would find ways to get their information more reliably and quickly. Nowadays, it’s how most people get their news first, fake or not. Radio stations can’t compete with that (and it should also be noted that newspapers, with their “dead tree” editions are no match for that either). Sure, CHML was probably the “newsiest” station in the city, but in the end it wasn’t enough. Despite all the hard work of the talented individuals there, the station was forced to close up shop.
I mention CHML, but the fact is you could insert the call letters of numerous stations across North America into this column that have suffered a similar fate and basically tell the same story. One long-time radio personality said to me, “I think all radio stories are basically the same. Same story, just a different set of call letters!” Too true, it seems.
Despite CHML’s closure not coming as a great shock to me, I will admit it did throw me for a loop. Me, like many others, believed that the station was robbed of saying a proper goodbye, and their final sign-off was a disgrace and an insult to their almost a century worth of service to the community. I’ll have to admit I experienced a certain sadness and sense of void that I wasn’t expecting, even though it had been quite a number of years since I worked there. Although no radio experience is perfect, the pleasant memories definitely outnumbered the not-so-pleasant. And in that way, you always carry a piece of the station with you, no matter how many years have passed.
Peace out.
Paul Jeffries