Two items in the news this morning about Glenn Beck. The good news is Glenn has agreed to a 5 year contract extension for $100 million. Radio contracts typically are inflated, stating numbers based on hypothetical incentives like ad sales, ratings, # of affiliates. The other important thing to know is this is the amount paid to Glenn’s production company – Glenn is paying office rent, salaries for Pat Gray and Stu and the staff. Too bad, Media Matters.
The other news that indirectly affects Glenn is that Cumulus Media will add national syndication for Geraldo Rivera starting in August, directly competing against Beck from 9 AM to noon (ET). It is likely that Beck will suffer a similar devestating effect on his audience like Mike Huckabee has had on Rush Limbaugh.
News of the new contract probably comes as a shock to nutjobs like Van Jones and Randall Robinson who think they eviscerated Beck with their boycotts and online hatred.
“It is likely that Beck will suffer a similar devastating effect on his audience like Mike Huckabee has had on Rush Limbaugh. ”
LMAO !!
parrott
Interested to know if anyone thinks WABC will trim Imus’ last hour to run the full three-hour Geraldo show. I’d think Imus is more of a sure thing as far as revenue generation goes, but Don might not be opposed to lightening his workload a bit after all these years.
Lew Dickey’s management style is apparently mostly “Manage by spreadsheet”. He looks at each daypart at each radio station, what it costs to produce and how much revenue it generates. Ratings are not a factor (Cumulus does not subscribe to Arbitron, other than existing contracts it inherited). He assumes that if you manage the parts, that you’re managing the whole, which is really short sighted.
About half of the Imus affiliates already leave at 9 AM or earlier. Imus is turning 72 in about a month and has health issues (did you hear he has prostate cancer?) despite his wife’s best efforts as an expert in green living and integrative medicine. Don’s brother Fred died fairly recently.
Admittedly, Geraldo is only 3 years younger than Imus, but at some point you have to consider having a Plan B. Imus was on the Clear Channel station in New Haven on WELI for couple years, but he was dumped in favor of a local comic/DJ who probably has negligible ratings. Talking about cattle ranches is something kind of foreign to people living in New England, and most people here are not interested in politics as they already know all they need to know about it – just press the name with the D next to it.
You have discussed the complexities of syndication and ad allocation…. do you think that there was a chance Beck would have tried to self syndicate our of the Texas Media complex? Would that have even been possible? By the way I watched a documentary about Lew Wasserman from MCA – wow. An amazing life, amazing mind.
The Beck announcement has to be read carefully. Beck owns his own production company and GlennBeck.com and GBTV – part of the deal he just signed (included in the $100 million) is Premiere will handle ad sales for the web site and GBTV.
There is no way Beck could do his own syndication in radio, from a business standpoint or practically.. While his affiliations come and more frequently than Rush, he has something approaching the size of Rush’s syndication with about 400 affiliates (missing a few major markets still). I tracked them down at one point, including non-streaming stations. Just shuffling the paperwork for that is probably a full time job for several people, and soothing the angry station managers, etc…
I expected GBTV to be a little less connected to Clear Channel – but that ~$20 million a year guaranteed income makes it easier when it is time to convince someone to work for you or lease you a building, etc…
I plead guilty to not knowing anything about Lew Wasserman. Time for some research, I guess.
Press release
http://www.premiereradio.com/news/view/1251.html