After Paul Harvey died, ABC Radio turned over the “Good Day!” Franchise to Mike Huckabee, although they did away with the 15 minute show at 11:45 AM ET. Instead Huckabee fed a 5 minute news show that stations could run in place of a regular top of the hour newscast.<\/p>\n
Huckabee was then sold to Citadel then Cumulus. After Cumulus took over Citadel\/ABC about two years ago, cost cutter Lew Dickey approached Huckabee about starting a 3 hour show to kick Rush’s ass. The former Republican governor of Arkansas and Presidential candidate was so excited by the idea he agreed to do the show starting in 3 or 4 months. He would be paid based a a percentage of the profits.<\/p>\n
So how is it working out? Tom Taylor reports that Huckabee is coming up on his one year anniversary and is talking publicly about not renewing his contract. Huckabee is tired of getting up at 4:30 am and it is cutting into his social life, working from his home studio in Florida and not making any money.<\/p>\n
His show is almost exclusively heard on around 40 Cumulus stations, but not the former ABC power houses WABC and WLS. His show began the first day with a staged caller which was extremely obvious and caught by people in the radio business – the VP of programming for Cumulus called in pretending to be a listener and telling Huckabee what a great show he has and what a brilliant idea it was for Cumulus to hire him. Cumulus had no experience in radio syndication prior to buying Citadel\/ABC and it shows. It’s hard to talk your competitors into paying you for an unproven product.<\/p>\n
So how is it working out? With the normal disclaimer that stats here don’t necessarily correlate to full national audience using scientific methods, during the Noon-3PM period, Rush has 58% of all of the non-music radio audience. Jim Rome is #2 at 8% doing sports talk at CBS Sports. Huckabee? Less than Ed Schultz or Alex Jones.<\/p>\n
In raw numbers, that worked out as 1,321 listen attempts for Rush, 19 for Huckabee. Hispanic Jewish American moderate Geraldo Rivera, brought in by Cumulus to kick Glenn Beck’s ass from 9AM to Noon ET had 14 listeners for the week.<\/p>\n
These weekly raw numbers are roughly what they used to be daily. That’s partly due to the fact I’m working and not paying as much attention to manicuring the data and my “audience” migrating to Tunein, but a lot of it is post election audience drop off.<\/p>\n
Another radio industry watcher Jerry Del Colliano has been hinting for several weeks that Cumulus is seriously talking about completely dropping talk radio as a format. WLS and WABC probably would do well reverting to 60s music from their heyday with Mark Simone spinning stacks of wax using the turntable and reverb machine. Oh hold on – Simone now works for Clear Channel at WOR.<\/p>\n
Not to worry – Sweetjack is kicking the ass of Groupon.<\/p>\n
The FCC is actively talking about removing or at least relaxing the rules against foreigners owning or operating US radio stations. Lew can maybe have a graceful exit by selling out to China Radio International, Russia Today, or allow Al Jazerrah to acquire his company and merge it in with Al Gore’s CurrentTV. Of course, the only music allowed under Islamic law is that which honors Allah. Allah Akbar,<\/p>\n
Now once we get EMF (Klove and Air1) to edit all their songs replacing “Jesus” with “Allah”, the world will be at peace. God was called Allah in Aramaic, after all. It’s not like it is a big deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After Paul Harvey died, ABC Radio turned over the “Good Day!” Franchise to Mike Huckabee, although they did away with the 15 minute show at 11:45 AM ET. Instead Huckabee fed a 5 minute news show that stations could run … Continue reading