When Randy Michaels briefly took control of WGN-AM in Chicago, he convinced Mike McConnell to move from Clear Channel’s WLW-AM. McConnell just got demoted to podcast only.
WGN is an oddball station – very high AM ratings in a major market with a newspaper owner (grandfathered before the rule preventing newspapers from owning radio stations)
It’s pretty obvious that if Cumulus dumps Rush Limbaugh that he would land at WGN, with either Tribune Corp picking the show up or Clear Channel buying the station – they have $130 million in cash from their XM stock sale that needs to buy something
WGN could do worse than Limbaugh. I still wonder when Rush will end up on Sirius/XM anyway.
So far, he is sticking to his promise to go home with the ones that brung him to the dance. Lew Dickey is not one of them and neither is Bob Pittman. The advertiser pays business model looks less and less viable as private equity firms create chains that squeeze out local competition and Amazon undercuts brick and mortar retailers. People use the Internet to choose a place to eat.
Jerry del Colliana in today’s tease says he knows whuch format is going to replace news/talk when it dies – and it is not Sports. Radio One just dropped CBS Sports on one of its stations after the ratings went to zero. Sports is not the future
Here’s my analysis – As the industry consolidates with people having shows on networks rather than local stations, there is more talent than needed. That force is being met with the the most effective advertizing being done on the internet and sites such as yelp.com and yp.com.
As those two forces meet, expect to see the price for talent to fall. Someone like Rush that can pull in big ratings will always be paid well, but even his pay can decline – look at Howard Stern as an example.
Honestly, almost all of this talk can be done by podcasts. Certainly the home repair, gardening, auto repair, personal advice, chat about the federal budget, etc.. Look to Art Bell, his shows from last century are still being aired on radio…. and doing better than Air America (the radio network, not the CIA operation) ever did.
The only reason to listen to talk radio instead of the podcast is if it is live and it being live is an integral part of why people are listening. Since so many people now use cell phones and radio refuses to accept cell calls because of poor quality and that annoying slight latency using Skype, I don’t know where that leaves things.