Warning Signs
The 2019 En Frecuencia year in review
It was a year in which radio hit the public consciousness, a noisy and much-discussed digital TV project actually made it to air, and a year when religious radio continued its baby steps into the light.
But don’t be fooled. While big stories, those are not exactly the theme of this year. 2019 was about warning signs. Indications on the edges of Mexican broadcasting, from places like Hidalgo del Parral, Morelia, Matamoros, Ciudad Juárez, and Camino de Santa Teresa, that all is not well in this industry. Those of us who’ve spent time around anything with an XH in front of it should be pretty darn worried.
It was written on July 8 and snuck into the RPC on July 30. A casual observer might not have noticed much weird about the IFT uploading a letter, IFT/223/UCS/1630/2019, into their registry. But the IFT doesn’t upload letters of this variety, and they don’t ever upload them by their title.
As En Frecuencia reported that day, the letter between IFT unit heads was the first time we knew of the expiration of 17 radio station concessions. Another 15 or so showed up as expired outside of the letter. The reasons, as we’ve since learned: either the IFT granted additional extensions, during which concessionaires paid their renewals, when the LFTR did not allow more than one extension, or the concessionaires failed to formally notify the IFT that they accepted the terms of said renewals.
Expirations were on the back burner. A few stations had shown up as trouble spots before, and some of them closed this year. XHSFT-FM San Fernando Tamps. gave up the ghost in July, leaving tens of thousands without licensed FM radio service. Two station concessions expired in the same city: XHEAT-FM 102.5 and XHHHI-FM 99.3 Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, and the frequencies went dark in March and June, respectively. XHAYA-FM Atoyac de Álvarez Gro. folded to begin the year. And Núcleo Radio Mina of Minatitlán, Veracruz, while on firmer legal ground with its concessions, is silent thanks to its debt to the CFE. The power company wasn’t the only bill that stations were having trouble paying: XHPG-FM was ordered closed for a time so it could pay the IMSS.
But the concesiones vencidas took things to a whole new level. The Grim Reaper had it in for the Comarca Lagunera, targeting five FMs and motivating a station sale of Grupo Radio Centro Torreón to Multimedios. MegaRadio Ciudad Juárez, reeling from the death of its founder, is in for a direct hit, losing six stations and with the 7th listed as not having a renewal on file. Beyond the letter, Radio Centro Monterrey will lose a popular FM and a pair of AMs; embattled Radio S.A. now has more dead concessions than living ones; and Avanradio could be in for the loss of multiple frequencies in the Xalapa market. And so far, court challenges have not gone the endangered stations’ way.
Some station groups are also feeling the turbulent times. Capital Media ceased directly operating two frequencies (XHTTT Colima and XEITE Mexico City), and more than half of its stations have changed format or had their formats relaunched this year. Grupo Larsa Comunicaciones no longer has a commercial presence in Hermosillo or Ciudad Obregón, the two largest markets in Sonora, downsized in Nogales, and just lost its last social outpost outside of the state in Tijuana, yet they cropped up in Guaymas and Ures. Notable restructurings occurred this year at Radiorama in the state of Chiapas and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, and in the industry in general in Córdoba, Veracruz. RadioLevy handed the keys to its three-station Colima operation to Audiorama, ending a history that began when the Levy family put Colima’s first radio station on air in 1940. Less so related to the Mexican industry but still of note was the final closure of Broadcast Company of the Americas, which was down to one station — XEPRS-AM 1090 Tijuana.
And the requirement of lump sum renewals for broadcasting, panned by commissioners and broadcasters, may have motivated the November announcement that XHRIO-TDT Matamoros will not be renewed; there is a pending court case on the matter.
Late in the year, a batch of noncommercial station surrenders called attention to another warning light.
Medios Radiofónicos de Michoacán, which had held a social TV concession for Lázaro Cárdenas since 2018 and earlier in the year had its longstanding Morelia application approved, told the IFT they could have the stations back because the current condition of the economy did not make running a social TV venture viable and journalism was endangered by rising crime rates. The SPR cited new administration and a failure to obtain necessary resources when it dropped seven TV and two FM concessions the agency had obtained in 2016. And interest in new public broadcast outlets fell to new lows in 2019, with just two applications registered with the IFT all year.
Grupo Garza Limón dropped plans to build a TV station in Cuencamé, Dgo., from the IFT-6 auction and an FM social outlet obtained from a permit forest in Tepic.
Amid the backdrop of public comment for the rules for the next commercial radio station auction, two established broadcasters warned that their markets — Durango and Acámbaro — could not support additional radio stations, even despite the former being a state capital and fairly large city, urging the IFT to reconsider the process for determining where new commercial radio stations can be added.
Federal austerity brought the Instituto Mexicano de la Radio within days of having to cease all live programming in late June and had resulted in the group’s commercially authorized stations being unable to pay STIRTT union fees necessary for the use of “outside” talent belonging to the IMER state employees union, and thus air IMER news programming. A national outcry under the #IMER_SOS hashtag forced President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take action to avert the impending crisis.
The crime problem is becoming the singular national imperative for President López Obrador and one that has continued to personally affect broadcasters. In 2019, we lost Rafael Murúa of XHOLP Radiokashana, the first community station in Baja California Sur; Samir Flores Soberanes, head of unlicensed community outlet Radio Amiltzinko 100.7 in Morelos; Santiago Barroso, morning news host for XHEMW-FM 91.1 in San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora; Jesús Ramos Rodríguez, 20-year host of Nuestra Región Hoy on XHEMZ-FM 99.9 in Emiliano Zapata, Tabasco; and Telésforo Santiago Enríquez of unlicensed community station Estéreo El Cafetal in Oaxaca.
The uncertain environment was good for some, however. On Sunday, June 16, matching newspaper ads heralded one of the largest Mexico City station sales in a very long time: Imagen was selling XHDL-FM 98.5 (and XHAV-FM 100.3 Guadalajara) to Grupo Andrade, owner of the El Heraldo de México newspaper. The company’s Heraldo Radio national news-talk network launched nine days later, displacing rock outlet RMX and creating a new home for several personalities cast off from Radio Centro and other outlets. (It has also signed up a few affiliate stations.)
The announcement set off a feverish back half of June that included the #IMER_SOS story and the end of another era as Radio Centro announced it would end its agreement to operate XHFO-FM Mexico City on July 31. Grupo Siete, programming 92.1 for the first time since the early 1990s, created a more musical station, but one with a heavy news/talk load: XFM, with a classic hits sound aimed at Generation X and Central FM from Pedro Ferriz de Con holding down mornings. It also resulted in XHABCJ-FM, the brand new second-wave ABC Radio migrant for Guadalajara, going rock as an extension of the Rock 101 radio show that the network already had.
Televisa, after having explored the possibility last year, almost sold its radio division this year, but what seemed like a surefire bet — a sale to former Televisa executive and airline magnet Miguel Alemán Magnani — has now ended acrimoniously in competing lawsuits, financial worries, and questions over the future of the Interjet airline.
Multimedios expanded and protected its Torreón presence by buying out Radio Centro’s cluster there. It also made its first radio entry into Durango by taking over Radio Centro’s XHRPU-FM 102.9 and flipping it to La Lupe, and it added a second outlet for Nuevo Laredo by leasing new AM-FM migrant XHGNK-FM 96.7 and launching it as another La Lupe station. In addition, the company bought stations on the American side of the border in the Laredo and Rio Grande Valley markets, and in television it secured affiliation agreements with former Televisa local stations that give it coverage in Chihuahua and Hidalgo del Parral as well as a subchannel hookup in Tepic.
XHAVO, XHRR and XHCAO are supposed to be selling as well, but aside from an operator name, information has been beyond scarce, and no authorization has been approved by the IFT.
Grupo ACIR, which had been fairly quiet all year, showed up in December when it announced that it and Disney were going separate ways and it was launching a replacement pop network, Match, on 10 stations beginning January 7, 2020.
In television, there were several critical sign-ons from the IFT-6 auction. A lot of ink was spilled over the dramatic, high-profile, transmitter-moving XHFAMX “La Octava”— which headed off a number of its doubters by meeting its October 31 sign-on deadline and doing it from Chiquihuite, though evidently at reduced power for two months — but even larger was the activation of a significant portion of the expanded Telsusa network. Telsusa’s local operation is already underway in Puebla, and transmitters are in place in Campeche and Yucatán. We also saw XHRTTS sign on as XHNTV “8 NTV”, a Multimedios-aligned outlet serving Nayarit, and the two remaining TV Mar main stations went into service in Baja California Sur.
2019 also saw a slew of radio station sign-ons. Some of them came from the IFT-4 auction. From XHPCHQ-FM in January to XHPLPM-FM in December, stations continue to filter in from the auction, but several of the largest winners (Acustik/Origen, Pantalla Líquida, and really TV Zac) have yet to put even one facility in operation. In Coahuila, Radio Medios de Monclova aka Fundación de la Radio Cultural made its move and built out its expansion stations for its Espacio cultural network. The final second-wave migrant in Nuevo Laredo, XHGNK-FM, showed up under the radar in early July, was DXed by Andy Bolin in Illinois while still running 1370 AM IDs, and then Multimedios promptly leased it and put La Lupe on the new 96.7 frequency.
There were also multiple new religious stations, like XHPECO-FM “Familiar FM” 105.5 in Monclova, pirate-turned-legal XHCSAE-FM 100.1 Ciudad Obregón, pirate-turned-legal XHCSBI-FM 104.3 Chilpancingo, and XHMTM-FM 91.3 in Montemorelos, Nuevo León. In the pure social category, XHPOZ-FM went on air from the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Poza Rica, after the Veracruz private college endured a nearly 15-year wait to get the concession awarded. A good year for new community awards also saw the launch of XHSCBI-FM Villahermosa, one of the largest-market community stations, and in March XHCDMX-FM Violeta Radio began broadcasting for Mexico City.
Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, got all the pending stations it had coming into the year, all under common operation: commercial XHPTEC-FM 99.1 and XHPSEB-FM 104.9 and community XHVMT-FM 106.9. There’s a second community station — XHSCBX-FM 105.7 — that has yet to begin operations on its assigned frequency.
Seeds were planted for a number of notable new stations this year. The IFT approved the first two community TV stations, both to existing community radio stations, late in the year. There’s XHDGD-FM 91.3 Durango, where we learned in March that the woman who signed the concession paperwork is also a sitting federal deputy. Also in Durango is a state network award absolutely nobody is talking about, which would serve about 66% of the state’s population from three transmitters (XHCPAQ-AR-AS) and for which a state agency, the Sistema de Radio y Televisión de Durango, has already been created:
The most noteworthy new station award of 2019 got its attention for its concessionaire’s name. On April 10, the IFT dispatched a three-applicant mutually exclusive group for a social FM allotment in Mérida, XHCSAG-FM 101.9, and the winner, per the IFT’s typical procedures, was the applicant that had the fewest stations and filed the earliest: La Visión de Dios, A.C. With “God” in the name, the alarm bells rang once the news hit the national media. Local journalists couldn’t find the address specified in the rural Chichí Suárez area of town. Analysts criticized the IFT’s blindness about awards, even when they didn’t involve registered religious ministers or associations (neither of which were involved in La Visión de Dios — though the resulting furor led me to find that there were two improper awards in 2018). Organizations called on the IFT to change its mind. The fact that a concesión única comes free with every new broadcast concession awarded led to baseless speculation about cable channels. Such was the fervor that Rebeca Chan Camara, the woman behind La Visión de Dios, gave an interview to explain what exactly the new XHCSAG would do.
What’s Next
2020 promises to continue some of the themes we’ll see this year. Much will depend on the state of the economy and the government’s efforts to bring crime back under control. But there are also storylines setting up for the new year:
- Will Radio Disney make its return on independent stations, and if so, which regional broadcasters will hook up with the mouse?
- How will the IFT-8 radio station auction, slated for next year, shape up in the aforementioned uncertain environment?
- Will the concesiones vencidas leave the air?
- What will new stations bring to the Mexican radio landscape?
- How will the fight between Televisa and Miguel Alemán shake out?
There are many more questions to be asked — and 2020 could provide answers to some of the unresolved ones that were posed in this chaotic year for broadcasting.
