Liberty Works is dedicated to reawakening Americans to the founding principles of natural rights and limited government, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, by broadcasting Liberty-oriented talk radio shows through an expanding network of commercial and non-commercial FM stations.
This is the Mission Statement of WOGF-FM in the Tampa Florida market. The State of Florida ordered the station into receivership, according to the Tom Taylor newsletter. For now, the station is silent.
The station schedule is heavy on TRN programming (Phil Hendre, Man Cow, Laura Ingrham, Michael Savage) along with Glen Beck and Alex Jones and an assortment of pastors, Christian lawyers and IRS tax protestors.
I wonder if Glen [sic] Beck has ever considered buying radio stations?
You are full of great ideas.
Although ALL BECK ALL THE TIME mite be a little TOO much to handle! LOL
Hey Art, thanks for everything you do and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
I have been snickering and guffawing at the ways I imagine an evil micromanager might celebrate the holidays…… heh heh heh. I second ICCDude, the very best of the season to you and a Happy New Year 2011. Thank you for your work.
I’m adding in complete programming schedules for 429 NPR radio stations.
Merry Christmas!
Art, what’s your take on the Premiere CEO’s new role as head of sales for theblaze.com ?
The person most at risk from TheBlaze is Matt Drudge. Real “journalism” costs a lot of money – developing a network of reliable sources, editors to insist on fact checking, lawyers to defend you from libel lawsuits. The establishment media is imploding – as a couple of my polls allude to, once newspapers are dead, there is nothing for Matt Drudge to leach from. A real news service can’t be a recluse reading the news wires behind a gated community with an occasional tip from someone via an IM.
Glenn also hired the former CEO of the Huffington Post Betsy Morgan. It’s worth remembering that Andrew Breitbart also worked for Ariana Huffington. On one level, I think that’s a good thing – the worst thing that could happen is for TheBlaze to become like WorldNetDaily, pushing conspiracy theories, scaring people into buy gold coins with 50% markups, and herbal cures – or the Free Republic, where people repeat the same rumors back and forth to each other without doing any fact checking, and declare that because they are talking about it, it must be a fact.
To your question – and thanks for bringing it up since I didn’t hear the show – Kraig Kitchin is the person you are asking about. My take is “this is a really big deal”. First a little history to set the stage…
He’s been with Premiere since 1987 – you’ll notice that is the time frame when Rush Limbaugh started syndication. Prior to that, he worked for Katz Media – the company that sells national advertising spots for local radio. (Katz is now the only big player left in that business and is a subsidiary of Clear Channel)
If you run down the top 10 list of syndicated radio people, most of them (including Beck) had their careers advised by Kitchin. He’s not a “poser” – he was the reason Premiere became so dominant in syndicated radio, especially talk.
In 1998, the radio business was awash in money and everyone was merging with everyone. Premiere had been acquired in 1997 by a company called Jacor which was run by a man named Sam Zell (who tried to take over Tribune Corporation a few years ago and failed and drove it into bankruptcy)… Clear Channel then bought up Jacor in 1998 for $4.4 billion.
He stayed at Clear Channel for 10 years and left in 2008. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Dean Edell, Bob Costas, and Dr Laura leaving Premiere are related. Clear Channel is in trouble. The day before Christmas they put out a vague press release that they are exploring restructuring options of their $20 billion in debt. One of the options for Clear Channel is to sell off some of its assets to buy down debt – they own 1) Radio stations 2) Billboards in the US and Europe 3) Katz (whose head guy just died) and 4) Premiere. The more people who leave Premiere, the less it is worth.
I’ve speculated for some time that the FCC and pressure on sponsors is going to force Beck and Limbaugh ultimately to Sirius/XM – or whatever it is that replaces radio. Beck, Rush, Coast to Coast, Dr Laura and all of the Premiere shows have been pushing streaming audio and podcasting on a subscription basis for a long time. If 10 million people are willing to pay $10 a month, that is $1.2 billion a year. Rush makes something along the lines of $50 million a year and he’s the expensive guy (except for Howard Stern)
Here is an interesting interview with Delilah When she made the switch from Jones to Premiere, she insisted that Clear Channel not “take over” the existing affiliates that had been loyal to her when she grew her program. The fact that Clear Channel has moved Rush from WSJS in North Carolina and off WRKO in Boston to move them to their own stations after he left is probably not a coincidence.
I’m pretty sure he is the guy who strongly encouraged Rush, Beck and Dr Laura to form their own production companies to mange their own destiny, and not be subject to the whims of a program manager poking his head in the door making suggestions (See: Neal Boortz and WSB)
I take this as the strongest sign yet that advertiser supported syndicated talk radio is on life support. Ratings don’t mean a thing if you can’t get people to buy ads.
Whether TheBlaze can be made into a self-sustaining business with a real staff of journalists is a tall order. Beck announced that he is going to “put millions of dollars of his own money” into funding this thing. I hear that and then I hear him fretting that he can’t unload his home in Connecticut because it is worth several hundred thousand dollars less than what he owes and I’m confused by his decisions.
Be suspicious of anyone running around touting “we had X million page views”. As an example, Matt Drudge counts his page views and posts them in near real time. What you may not realize is that his page auto-refreshes every 3 minutes. Back when I was running FindAnISP.com, I advertised on Drudge for about a day. What I found was my “ads” were being displayed on computers in the middle of the night when nobody was there to look at them. I would get 304 errors, which indicate that my ad had already appeared on this specific computer before and didn’t need to be sent to the computer again. Drudge could design the web site so it doesn’t count auto-refreshes, but that would hurt his revenue model.