Randy Michaels didn’t become head of Clear Channel 14 years ago by being a wall flower.\u00a0\u00a0 A lot of people in radio hate his guts, but a lot of people would follow him anywhere and do anything for him.<\/p>\n
Merlin Media – his company funded by a Chicago based investment firm and partly owned by Emmis Radio started two all news FM stations in major major markets (New York and Chicago) going head to head against CBS radio – if you look up Risk Taker in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Randy Michaels.<\/p>\n
When the rapture didn’t happen on May 21st, 2011, Harold Camping’s Family Radio was suddenly in serious financial trouble – having borrowed a lot of money for those “The World is going to end – repent before it is too late” billboards.<\/p>\n
The reason people loaned Family Radio the money was Family Radio owned about half a dozen FM radio licenses in major markets in the commercial part of the FM band – WKDN-FM in Camden, New Jersey<\/a> (Across the river from Philadelphia) was one of those stations.\u00a0\u00a0 While WKDN-FM is a government license, it isn’t a station – it’s an FM transmitter on someone else’s AM radio tower that had a main studio waiver.\u00a0\u00a0 There is no office, no studio, minimal equipment – but a license to ready the #7 largest market in the United States.<\/p>\n The station was shopped around for people who could buy it (given the FCC ownership limits) and the winner was Merlin Media at $22.5 million.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The Philadelphia market has about 4.4 million people in it, so they paid roughly $4 per potential listener<\/p>\n Yesterday, the new owners played the song “The End of the World as we Know it” and launched the new station WWIQ – “All Hannity All the Time<\/a>” (Oh, god).\u00a0\u00a0 This is what people in radio call “Stunting” – a temporary period when the station is changing format and tries to attraction attention to itself while it works on engineering issues, hires new staff, etc – the station will eventually be carrying Hannity and Rush (CBS and Premiere have announced they won’t be renewing the contract that ends in June), and it’s widely expected that Glenn Beck will be on the station, as he is not currently heard in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n Very early on in Glenn Beck’s radio syndication he was living in Philadelphia and doing the show from New York – Glenn had moved to Philadelphia to be close to his ex-wife and their child.\u00a0 Stu and Glenn were commuting every day by car (2 hrs each way) – I’m not sure if Stu isn’t still doing that commute.\u00a0 In 2000, John F Street won the election as Mayor and following in the footsteps of Coleman Young in Detroit 30 years earlier – announced on election night that “This is OUR city now” (meaning black people) and the city was freed from the ghost of Frank Rizzo<\/a> – setting the stage for the exodus of productive non-black people from the city.<\/p>\n Glenn Beck took the hint and moved to Connecticut leaving Michael Smerconish to be the king of “Conservative” talk radio in Philadelphia.\u00a0 Smerconish supported Barack Obama in 2008 – he knows how the game is played and is willing t play it.<\/p>\n Philadelphia isn’t much of a talk town.\u00a0 CBS’s KYW-AM does All News, and the next most popular non-music station is WHYY-FM, the NPR affiliate.\u00a0 WPHT-AM, the CBS news\/talk station is about half the audience of WHYY, and then you have people listening to far away stations like WOR and WABC\u00a0 in New York and New Jersey.\u00a0 That’s it.<\/p>\n The city of Philadelphia is now 43% black according to the 2010 Census.\u00a0 Sean Hannity is going to take back OUR city.\u00a0\u00a0 Sure he is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Randy Michaels didn’t become head of Clear Channel 14 years ago by being a wall flower.\u00a0\u00a0 A lot of people in radio hate his guts, but a lot of people would follow him anywhere and do anything for him. Merlin … Continue reading