Rush & Beck weekend shows are now the most listened to weekend shows – Kim Komando is now #3. If I were programming a station (and it is contractually possible), I would rerun all 15 hours of each show on the weekend – to pick up the listeners who can’t hear the shows because they have jobs….
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Agreed. 9 a.m. to 12 midnight, nonstop marathons… Beck on Saturday, Rush on Sunday.
And you’ll notice Hannity is NOT on my list :) If I could only do one, it would be Beck. The pace of his show at times is getting where it would be useful to hear it a second time. Rush is the master of stretching 2 minutes of content to a 15 minute segment….
When WRNO in New Orleans picked up Rush, they “stunted” for the first week as if Rush would be on 24 hrs/day. I think someone should try that for real :) I’m pretty sure though that Premiere’s objective is to try to herd people into signing up for Rush’s premium 24/7 service.
It is too bad that John Bachelor is stuck in the “radio dead zone” of Saturday nights (I personally am glad he is on in this slot because I actually listen on Saturday nights — what can I say, I have pretty dull life! :-)
Bachelor usually has excellent, intelligent guests and provides thoughtful insights into the strategic situation around the globe. I wish he could get a regular slot at a better day and time so that more people might hear his programs.
Of all the weekend time slots, though, the late-night position tends to be the one with the least problems. There’s very little local competition, most sports are over by 10 or 11, and all you’re up against are Coast to Coast reruns (and seriously, don’t we already have enough of those during the week already?). I recall Matt Drudge having a very successful show in that time slot for several years. Newsmagazines like Drudge’s show and John Batchelor are a great fit for that time slot, especially on the 50-kilowatt stations.
While most of Saturday and Sunday are indeed dead zones, the night shift is decidedly less so.
You guys are definitely on the right track. Foyle is right re Batchelor — the guests are terrific creditable people (right now he’s promo-ing John Bolton, who seems to be a weekly regular, and Victor Davis Hanson, the historian. Plus Diana West is on a lot as well. Also some wonderful WSJ reporters who actually know what they’re talking about. ) Batchelor is superb radio for smart people are are paying attention and want to know what’s going on in this country (and the world.) More and more I skip tv on Sunday nights (even Masterpiece Theater if it ain’t up to snuff or if the Philly PBS affiliate is running yet another begathon) in favor of listening to Batchelor.
Also agree that weekend editions of the best talkers is a smart idea for stations, especially evening-to-late-night on Saturdays and Sundays. Re-runs are OK but, frankly, I think a special weekend edition (fresh interviews and commmentary) could work, too. They could pre-tape new stuff and cut in the best of the content from the previous week. When is the radio industry going to get it that there are millions of potential listeners out here in the real world who are conservatives and want decent programming on the weekends?
And I think programming like that could even give tv a run for its money. I didn’t watch any of the talking heads shows this morning with Obama; I gave up years ago on these dinosaur shows with the same boring commentators saying the same predictable things to the same insipid guests (most from the “official sources” category of people. Do any of you really care what some deputy assistant Secty of State says about anything anymore?) I want more as an American citiizen and a consumer of news and information.
When you think about it: How many advertisers would a radio network really need to make weekend radio fly financially? I mean, really? Talk radio is cheap to produce; they could do weekend shows on a shoestring and make plenty of money. (NOTE: Isn’t that sort of what’s happening re the Jay Leno show now in primetime? I heard NBC can put his talk show on the air five nights a week for way less than it costs them to produce five hour-long episodes of five different dramatic series. So they’re givin’ it a spin around the block to see what happens.) The radio beancounters should crunch the numbers and then just get on with making high-quality weekend radio.
One more thought: Wish the people behind Jerry Doyle would get a weekend newsmagazine-type edition of his show up and running (and marketed to some of the big local markets around the country.) He’d be great on Sunday mornings/early afternoons on radio up against the dinosaurs on tv. Sam and Cokie on tv vs. Jerry on radio? Who would you pick?
FINALLY: Picking up again on the tv vs. radio thing: I think there is a kind of prejudice against radio (and those of us who are loyal to it as a medium.) I think the attitude is that if you are a radio listener of the NPR type, you are smart. If you are a listener of the Glenn Beck or Jerry Doyle type, you are sort of dumb. (Anybody read the Time Magazine cover story on Beck this week?) And I think there’s a corollary prejudice: that tv is a “better”
medium than radio. (Translate “better” as hipper, more influential, whatever.) I don’t buy that. If I spend my Sunday night with Batchelor rather than watching television, did I trade down, from a “greater” medium to a “lesser” medium? As I see it, I didn’t; I just gave up pictures flashing around in front of my eyeballs. So what? What’s the great loss to me? All I did was bypass a second-rate movie on AMC (or a third-rate series on ABC) for Bolton and Hanson and other smart people willing to spend part of their Sunday night talking to John Batchelor (and
me and you.)
Thanks, Fred, for starting a thread that really got me (and obviously other faithful SRG fans) thinking about weekend radio. I’d put a little smiley face here for you if I had a clue how to do that.
Arbitron’s PPM is sorting out what people “want” to listen to on radio vs what they actually listen to (which is why Smooth Jazz stations are shutting down all over the country). While I want John Batchelor to be a success, his ratings even here are pretty mediocre. I’m afraid that a country full of people who can’t even name the Vice President can’t possibly keep up with a discussion of the issue of credit default swaps and and the internal politics of Russia. At the risk of getting in trouble, I think too much of his show is devoted to the events in the middle east. One of his segments this week was dedicated to the “theft” of an art collection in Philadelpia by the Pew Trust – for a program that’s already narrow casting, that’s really narrow casting. Then he had a guest on pounding on the ACORN journalists for being Republican Operatives (along with Glenn Beck), and John heartily agreed that it[s people like Beck who are destroying the Republican Party. That’s the point at which I turned the show off. Beck is not a Republican, and the most cursory research would turn that up pretty fast.