It isn’t a big secret that many people in the Radio business despise Conservative talk radio – the only reason it is on the air is they are more greedy than principled.
So don’t be surprised when station owners use the events of this past weekend’s “false flag” attack as a rationale to “pull the plug” on their conservative news/talk programming.
WQMR-FM “flipped” formats this morning without warning, dropping News Talk (Mancow, Fred Thompson, Mark Levin, John Batchelor, Phil Hendrie). They’ve replaced the lineup with “Hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s”.
WQMR-FM is licensed to Snow Hill, Maryland, near the bottom of the Maryland part of the Delmarva peninsula along the ocean. My impression is this area is popular for government retirees and consultants. It’s too far to commute to Washington DC every day (about a 2-3 hour drive), but still within reach for an occasional meeting or for telecommuters. There are very few ways on and off the peninsula, which facilities security considerations.
To provide some balance, the station’s ratings are less than 1% share – that talk lineup is the second string. The station is a Class A FM license, which is the weakest signal for commercial stations.
That’s disappointing. I remember when WQMR was my Imus station of choice (back before the Nappy Headed comments). They also had a habit of streaming NFL games without the league’s permission, and while the other sports they have still seem to be there, the NFL seems to have been removed.
As far as low-bitrate stations, which I liked because I had dialup for years, WQMR was a favorite of mine. It will be missed.
They have a lot of programming changes over the years – at various times, they had carried Curtis Sliwa, Jay Severin (for his 2 weeks in syndication), CNN Headline news, ESPN AllNight, Mike Francesa (“Mike and Mad Dog”) while he was under his non-compete, O’Reilly, Dr Laura, Larry Elder, Jim Cramer, and Tom Leykis. They’re the #4 talk station in a tiny market behind WGMD (Rush, Coast to Coast, Savage), WICO-AM (Q&R,Beck,Rush,Hannity,Savage,C2C), and WCBM-AM out of Baltimore (day/night).. (Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Savage, C2C)
Does the left sound like they are nudging a little towards the re-birth of Air America again ?
The web site and stream for KNRS in Salt Lake city are gone. KNRS is a Clear Channel news/talk station. They recently picked up Hannity after KSL dumped him for unspecified problems with the content of his show.
They are? They have a new streaming widget: http://www.knrs.com/article/KNRS-Streaming-Widget.html
I was just there. Currently Hannity. ;)
It appears they launched a new version of the web site today and I found it part way through being updated. The old “Freedom” slogan is gone and the AM side is now just a redirect to “Family Values” KNRS. Goodbye, Freedom!
Kind of off topic: the KNRS evaporation made me wonder about the stations carrying streaming financially. I suppose that larger and medium stations can get enough income from ads most of the time? What does streaming cost? Is it the same sort of thing that Murdoch discovered (and the dirt-bag NYTimes) about making money by charging for content on-line? Have we enjoyed the ‘golden age’ of net streaming?
You would think I would know why stations stream ;)
Ando Media is very involved in this – they have been getting all the big guys to “instrument” their players so streams can be counted, watched in real time and analyzed for demographics. Highly targeted ads are much more valuable than random or repeated ads. The local station that streams the same ad for the local pancake place to every visitor is underselling their product.
The costs of streaming the way the smart folks are doing it is relatively inexpensive. Paying licensing fees for music is more than the bandwidth. The NAB and the radio labor union AFTRA haven’t come to terms over the fees paid to VoiceOver talent when the commercials are streamed, which is why streams are filled with inane PSAs instead of real (inane) advertisements.
What Ando has found is people are running en masse to Pandora and AOL/Yahoo music, Last.fm and Slacker coming up fast. At any time, pandora has around 500,000 active sessions going. Ando’s report doesn’t mention if they filter out non-US listeners (part of the reason why CBS and clear channel block non-US listeners)
At CES this week, there are lots of stuff for cars that suggest the days of AM/FM radios having exclusive access to drivers are numbered – and that’s the meat and potatoes of radio. Sirius/XM has 20 million subscribers willing to pay ~$20 a month. Long term, I think they’re going to be overrun by IP based broadband wireless, but that has a lot to do with the FCC and NAB and who gets to use spectrum in the future.
“It isn’t a big secret that many people in the Radio business despise Conservative talk radio ”
Anybody who doesn’t believe that only has to go over to the Radio-Info boards…
Bingo!
Every once in a while, Rush will tell the story of how his syndication started – that pretty much every consultant in the “radio biz” said it was a crazy idea to have a political talk show in the middle of the day – one that doesn’t have guests and isn’t “Progressive”. The number of people who appointed themselves as the one who would kick Rush’s ass and failed is getting very long. Many people “in the business” don’t even know that Rush did a syndicated TV show for 4 years.
My biggest concern is that EIB network is a slogan, not a network – as he explained a few days ago. Rush turned 60 this week. He might be another Barry Farber or Bob Grant and stay healthy and coherent into his 80s, but the odds are against that. Clear Channel / Premiere still owes $20 billion it doesn’t have and could fall into the hands of people not so inclined to protect Rush. The guy who built Premiere is now working for Glenn Beck. Since he left Premiere, they’ve lost Dr Laura, Bob Costas, and Dr Edell. It’s looking like a pattern.