“Brian and the Judge” is losing The Judge. This show has never had a significant audience.
I’ve alluded to this before in a poll question – I really don’t understand what it is with Radio Program Directors and wanting to put lawyers on the air.
I count a total of 3 affiliates carrying the show (other than Sirius/XM). Only WDIS-AM – a 1000 watt daytime only station in Norfolk, Mass (near Boston) carries the show live, and they only carry 2 of the 3 hours.
My rule of thumb is that the total number of affiliates of a program is 2 or 3 times the number I’ve found that stream. Most of the others will be really small market stations with negligible audience. Fox News Radio has done a horrible job of convincing terrestrial radio to carry their programming.
I remember when that show came out. I always thought it was just going to be a stop-gap until Tony Snow came back (he never did). Come to think of it, the show never really had a chance: the duo was up against Beck, Ingraham, and Dennis Miller, not to mention local shows on the West Coast AM drive. I’m assuming somewhere along the line that Fox News Radio (with the possible exception of Alan Colmes) changed their focus from terrestrial to satellite and are primarily programming those shows for their satellite talk channel. (One thing to think about: Fox’s radio services are handled by Premiere (Beck’s syndicator), so Fox probably didn’t want to give Beck too much competition lest they get booted to another company, or worse, end up without one altogether.
I kind of like John Gibson, but when I listen, I get the same feeling when I used to be in a chat room with a radio show – that the entire audience is seven people and the same people call in every day. I spent a couple evenings in Rusty Humphries video chat room – same feeling. Among other things, I learned that the reason he has Suzanne Somers on Friday is that he leaves early and puts on a tape. It isn’t just Savage at TRN that does that.
Kind of tying those two ideas together, sometimes I think that it’s better to be a regular guest host than to try and launch a whole new syndicated show and further complicate the market. Particularly with Fox. Gibson and Napolitano were frequent sub-hosts for O’Reilly and Tony Snow, and got good reviews, but when it comes to a new five-day-a-week show, you not only have to have material for it, but you have to set up affiliates and ad sales in an already crowded market (the broadcast spectrum isn’t expanding anytime soon, HD Radio subchannels notwithstanding). Fox couldn’t do that. Certain networks do a decent job with getting national coverage (Westwood One, Citadel, and Premiere) and others don’t (Fox News, Radio America, a lot of the small 24-hour nets, even TRN), but even the ones that do well have to fight to get clearances most of the time.