Radio isn’t coming in loud and clear anymore in Los Angeles.

With the recession cutting deeply into ad sales, and the perception that new media and devices such as iPods are stealing listeners’ ears, stations in Los Angeles County have been filling out pink slips, rethinking their advertising strategies and, in one recent case, converting to Spanish-language programming to cope with the new realities of radioland.

The Southern California Broadcasters Association projects local radio stations will sustain a 10 percent drop in revenue this year. That would come after an 11 percent revenue decline the association estimates that L.A. broadcasters experienced last year.

The financial static is unlike anything many industry veterans have experienced.

“We’re strapping in for a tough year,” said John H. Davison, president and general manager of the two Citadel Broadcasting Corp. stations in Los Angeles, KABC-AM (790) and KLOS-FM (95.5), which had two rounds of layoffs last year.

All is not gloom. Analysts expect the local radio industry to rebound as the economy recovers because it’s such a dominant media here, partly because L.A.’s slow-motion traffic gives motorists plenty of time to tune in their car radios. With more than 60 stations that reach in excess of 10 million people and generate roughly $1.2 billion in advertising sales annually, Los Angeles is the world’s largest radio market.

But radio, like other media such as newspapers, is caught in a transition period as audiences and advertisers are respectively spending more time and money in the digital world. And many local stations are still grappling with how to capitalize on the county’s burgeoning Hispanic and Latino populations, which in 2008 made up more than 47 percent of the county’s residents and have given rise to a slew of Spanish-language radio stations.

The result: There’s been a full spectrum of tumult in local radio, including cuts in staff.

“It’s sad to me as a listener, and it’s sad to me as a member of the staff,” said “Day to Day” co-host Alex Cohen, who is facing unemployment when National Public Radio Inc. takes her show off the air in mid-March.

Her employer announced in December that it would cut 33 people from NPR West, and end “Day to Day” and “News and Notes,” two shows produced at its Culver City facility.

NPR made the cuts because its projected budget deficit this year ballooned from $2 million to $23 million as corporate underwriting dried up.

“It’s scary out there in a lot of ways,” Cohen said.

Local focus

Research firm IbisWorld projects that radio advertising nationwide will fall 3.8 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2010. Those numbers can be attributed mostly to falling sales at car dealers and local retailers, traditionally among the biggest spenders for radio ads.

Davison of Citadel Broadcasting estimated that auto dealerships usually account for roughly one-third of his stations’ revenues. He said it fell this year, but declined to say how much.

“That’s been our bread and butter,” he said of the auto ads.

Local retailers ranging from mom-and-pop operations to regional chains such as mattress seller Sit ‘n Sleep have traditionally accounted for 35 percent to 40 percent of radio advertising in the county. But those numbers can go as high as 60 percent at some stations, said Mary Beth Garber, president of the Southern California Broadcasters Association.

Because the smaller retailers have lower margins than big chains, the downturn is especially tough on many of them. They in turn have scaled back on advertising, and radio stations have had to fight harder to get their business.

For instance, KABC, which broadcasts Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games, is touting that connection more this year to convince advertisers to buy spots.

“Without the Dodgers, we’d be hurting a lot more right now,” said Davison.

Some stations are trying to sell ad time to health care companies, pawn shops and gold buyers, businesses that have not been regular radio advertisers in the past.

And at some local stations, Garber said advertising reps familiar with small businesses are being hired even as others are being laid off.

Finally, of course, radio executives admit they’ve been selling spots at discounts. That is usually considered an undesirable tactic; once discounts start being offered, every advertiser wants one each one steeper than the last.

Hablas Espanol?

The continuing rise of Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles has cut two ways. It has given rise to a plethora of local Spanish stations that appear in relatively good position to weather the recession. Radio en Espanol is seen as a distinctly separate broadcast sector, so its growth has not noticeably hurt English-language stations. But it has forced station managers to weigh how they can attract Hispanic and Latino listenership or risk missing out on a growing demographic that advertisers want to reach.

A little more than a decade ago, L.A. County was home to only a half-dozen or so Spanish-language stations. Now, that number has doubled, and they draw almost one-fifth of the overall radio revenue in the region. Spanish-language radio hit a new high in 2007 when the top-rated station in the county was Univision Communications Inc.-owned KLVE FM (107.5), which plays contemporary Spanish-language hits. According to the most recent ratings, four of L.A.’s top 10 stations are Spanish language.

And the market saw a new entrant recently when Santa Monica-based Entravision Communications Corp. pulled the plug on its alternative music station Indie 103 (KDLE/KDLG FM (103.1)) and replaced it with Spanish-language El Gato, which launched Jan. 15.

Indie 103 had a loyal following, but its signal was weak and ratings low.

“We took the stance that we could do better from a revenue and ratings standpoint by switching to Spanish-language radio,” Jeff Lieberman, president of Entravision’s radio division, told the Business Journal.

Lieberman said Entravision did see a dip in revenue last year, but that it was not particularly steep compared with the industry average. In the third quarter of 2008, the company’s revenue fell about 3 percent; radio stations nationwide saw a roughly 9 percent dip.

Latino audiences tend to be loyal radio listeners, and their growing population is attractive to advertisers, hence the notion that the stations are better insulated from the recession.

The strength of Spanish-language radio has not gone unnoticed. At KABC, for example, host John Phillips recently invited Juan Razo, a popular Spanish-language radio host on Burbank-based KBUE-FM (105.5) who’s known to his listeners as the character “Don Cheto,” to share the booth with him on Phillips’ evening show.

“The response was unbelievable,” Phillips said. “The board lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Phillips saw the invitation partly as an attempt to reach an audience that might not normally tune in on Saturday nights to hear him talk about national politics and pop culture.

“If you look at the demographics of the city, Latinos are going to be a huge part of the future,” he said. “And we have to find ways to involve them.”

Digital media

The impact of new technology on radio, including Internet radio and mobile devices such as iPods, is difficult to gauge. Many radio stations are trying to expand their presence on the Internet even as executives insist the Web and portable music players have not cut into their listenership.

Studies would seem to back them up. A recent study by Arbitron Inc., the firm that compiles radio ratings, found that Americans listen to an average of 20 hours of radio a week, roughly the same as in recent years, and that radio continues to reach 94 percent of the population over the age of 12.

But even if the overall listenership isn’t declining, it’s likely that people are listening to the radio in shorter increments as more media compete for their time, said George Van Horn, an IbisWorld senior analyst based in Chicago.

“With the younger age groups and the proliferation of iPods and digital music, these younger audiences have complete control over what they want to listen to and when they want to listen to it,” Horn said. “That’s certainly a competitive issue relative to radio.”

It’s also likely that the rise of new media, including Internet social networking sites like MySpace and video Web sites such as Hulu.com, are forcing advertisers to spread their dollars around. That leaves less for radio.

Nationwide, radio revenue has been in a decline of about 2 percent a year since 2003. That’s about the time, Horn noted, that social networking sites started to take off.

But Garber of the Southern California Broadcasters Association disputes the notion that radio is no longer relevant, even to the young people who have flocked to social sites like Facebook.com.

When she was part of a recent panel discussion on media, Garber said a fellow panelist told her that his 19-year-old daughter didn’t listen to the radio at all. Garber made the daughter, who was in the audience, a bet: Garber would give her two free tickets to Wango Tango if she could tell her what it was and which radio station sponsored it.

The daughter answered instantly: It’s a music festival put on by KIIS-FM (102.7).

“I told him, ‘I rest my case,'” Garber said.