How do some of these stations stay on the air? Like many stations I’ve listened to, WBCN 1660 ‘America’s Talk’ in Charlotte has almost no real commercials, just the Ad Council stuff.
I’m afraid they’re going to go the way of 1220 WDYT and 960 WZRH, and I’ll lose out on Jason Lewis and Phil Hendrie.
WBCN is a very special station… It’s owned by CBS and until about 2 months ago was doing a simulcast of a sports station. It is now going head to head in news/talk against huge legacy 50kw WBT. Jason Lewis used to work at WBT before he headed north, so there is a little payback involved here, too.
What you hear on the stream and what is heard in Charlotte over the air are not necessarily the same thing. There are (or at least were) royalty issues that were causing radio stations to substitute PSAs or music or silence while their station was in a commercial break.
With all the said, your concern is still a valid one. CBS doesn’t particularly like Glenn Beck :)… but they do like money… the only CBS stations that have carried any Premiere programming were the ones that came from Infinity when the two companies merged (like KXNT in Las Vegas)… So this is a major experiment. For reasons I don’t know, Beck isn’t on any of the former ABC radio stations, which has locked him out of major markets (he’s still not heard in Chicago). If Beck drew away big numbers from WBT, that might open up the possibility of CBS doing format changes in some big cities to program more Conservative talk, but for now that’s mostly wishful thinking on my part.
Sorry about that, I should have pointed out that I live in Charlotte and listen to WBCN over the air. Rarely ever a real commercial on it, and during Jason Lewis they play his parody and retro ad filler (same as Limbaugh plays Paul Shanklin songs on some webcasts).
That’s why I mentioned WDYT and WZRH, two other local stations that were blips who couldn’t begin to put a dent in WBT.
As of right now, I don’t think anyone outside of hardcore news/talk junkies around here even know about WBCN. Hopefully they’re in the process of getting their act together, because like I said, I look forward to Lewis and Hendrie.
And while we’re on the topic of WBT… that is one station that would do well even if Clear Channel pulled here what they did with WPTF in Raleigh and WSJS in Winston-Salem/Greensboro, since they have a very strong line-up of locals, and even a strong second string for fill-ins. Their only syndicated programming during the week is Rush, an hour of Boortz, and Coast to Coast.
I think you know this, but to avoid confusion… WBT was sold by Lincoln Financial (who had merged with Jefferson Pilot Insurance) to Greater Media out of Boston – but Clear Channel has slowly been pulling Rush off of non-owned stations to their own stations and moving him to FM
My first job after college was working for Duke Power in downtown Charlotte. I’m giving very serious consideration to moving back to Charlotte or maybe Salisbury or Statesville. Pat McCrory and I were the PITA’s on the student government who viewed our job as more than just arranging parties…
Art
Don’t know how much about this station, but it’s a Chicago Station and it plays Beck.
http://www.560wind.com/
Oops you’re right.. That’s fairly recent a few weeks ago)… It’s Salem’s station – an okay station but not a powerhouse like WLS or WBBM. I knew I could count on somebody to catch that. I’m learning that an effective way to get people to post a reply is to make mistakes. The Internet is a curious thing.
Art I would not call it a mistake as much. I remember Beck saying last month (DEC.) they were going to be going on in Chicago. But where I read it, it was going to be the first of the month(JAN 3). Then I think he finally went on in the middle of the week (JAN 14). So it was really screwed up from the start. Yet, I still hear he is not on in a lot of major cities. I’m sure that will change this year.
I’m in Huntersville (major sub of Charlotte – white flight etc.) I looked at advert. $ in radio for my business – money where my mouth is – the talk radio rates were too high and the FM music stations that catered to my demo – the sales losers didn’t return phone calls to didn’t show for meet. That is typical fo this region though…. NO WORK ETHIC.
i think the AD Council stuff has more of leftist agenda all the time now…
lately i hear one that sounds like illegal aliens and they encouraging them to file for tax refunds or something…and all the census ads ive heard have minority voices as usual and some blather about make sure you’re counted so your district gets its “fair share” of gov’t money…and isn’t there one about environment with the children always with their “join the revolution” – what revolution?, the green revolution or more likely, the marxist/obama revolution….
and i see these weird online ads that says something like “obama wants moms to go back to school” and there’s a little video of a woman doing situps…i wonder who is behind these ads and are they getting some form of gov’t money for them?
Two thoughts about that school funding ad – most funding of schools is still done locally and has nothing to do with the Census. The script also presumes that an accurate count leads to increases in funding – but there are a number of large cities that are going to have big drops in population show up in the 2010 census….