Joe Madison #12 top hitter? Talkers Magazine is out with their top 100 list. Madison is the only one that seems wildly out of place. Joe is working at WOL-AM, a 370 watt class C AM station in Washington DC that gets like a 0.1% rating. His show is carried on Sirius / XM, but not syndicated like Al Sharpton – who isn’t even in the top 250 list
I used to listen to Joe Madison in the 1980s when he was on WXYT in Detroit, an ethnically diverse radio station – not a station targeting only one ethnic group. Joe is well connected within the civil rights community, but influential in radio nationally? Not a chance.
That’s absurd! I generally agree with Talkers Magazine and remember listening to the “Top Ten Count Down”, but Joe Madison at #12 doesn’t make sense.
Every year when I read that list there’s always one or two names that make me go, HUH?
Yeah, there are quite a few of these that have me scratching my head. Leslie Marshall makes the top 100 even though she has about one affiliate that I know of, WWKB Buffalo, and half the time she’s bumped off for minor league baseball. There may be others but I don’t know where.
Who on earth is Scott Hennen? Fargo– seriously? Above a bevy of syndicated talkers that could’ve made the heavy 100… Allen Hunt seems to be too high, too soon at 39…
Interestingly, Jay Severin is nowhere to be found. How quickly he’s fallen.
Obviously, all of this is subjective, but there are a lot of glaring issues, namely, an apparent overreliance on small-market hosts, especially at the lower end.
I know who Scott Hennen is – he took the unusual step about 2 years ago of building a brand new 50 kW AM Station that covers Fargo, North Dakota (and a big swath of that part of the country). No sooner was it built than the area was hit by huge floods and Hennen’s station was on 24 hrs a day at 50 kW doing emergency information (in emergency situations like this, you can stay on daytime power and screw protecting stations 1000 miles away). He’s also a radio friend of Rush Limbaugh.
Jay Severin is #52, just below Howie Carr. Blowing up his syndication deal – which is the Holy Grail of people doing talk – for no apparent reason other than maybe a negotiating ploy – probably earned him big negatives from industry people
OK, I must have missed his name scrolling down through the list– it struck me as odd that I wouldn’t find him anywhere on the 250. 52 sounds about right for him.
I didn’t even know who Leslie Marshall is… you’re right on the money.
She claims to be syndicated, but only lists the Progressive station in Buffalo, NY (which doesn’t stream). It sounds like most of her fame is on Cable TV – and since I don’t have a TV, I wouldn’t know her from that.
They say in a big long list, you tend to only remember the first and the last items. Odd choice indeed.
You are right about Leslie Marshall, Art. If it was not for her showing up on O’Reilly’s show once a week, I would have no idea who she was.
I guess these days if you can get get on two stations you can say you have a syndication deal. lol.