On the anniversary of his 28th year as a national talk show host, radio historians will remember Rush Limbaugh when he called himself Jeff Christy, an AM radio Top 40 disc jockey working at KQV in Pittsburgh. 28 years is an incredible run. Few have the talent to make it almost three decades on the…
People are outraged. People are sad. People are in shock. People are now, finally, speaking up over the execution of one of America’s former great and “heritage” stations, KGO-AM in San Francisco. Why now? What happened last week to KGO has been happening to radio stations, personalities, talk hosts, support personnel and news staffs for…
Translation: If you’re going down, you might as well go down in a memorable way. Donald Trump sure is memorable and the same could have been said about talk radio some 20 years ago. Conservative talk radio and the Republican party are connected, once again trying to energize their common “base.” Each are equally disconnected…
A lot can be learned from data and tracking it. For example, in radio and television, there are Nielsen ratings. You analyze ratings by the week, month or over a year to develop and see a trend. Is the station or program going up or down? Trending up is good. Trending down is bad. One…
A number of people seem to be “excited” about Rush Limbaugh’s new radio homes in Indianapolis and Boston. I just don’t believe Rush is. In Indianapolis, the heritage news/talk radio station is WIBC. Most radio geeks, me included, remember the bigger than life top-of-the-hour ID voiced by Chuck Riley. “Radio Indiana. (sfx) W-I-B-C Indianapolis.” …
I’ve been reading a lot about the Telos/25-7 Systems’ Voltair “black box” that some claim gives an unfair advantage to radio stations trying to game Nielsen’s PPM methodology. The box allegedly increases the chances the embedded PPM “watermark” on a station’s signal will be detected on a panelist’s meter. Is the Voltair unfair? I guess…
I had a conversation with a radio station general manager once…my boss. He wasn’t comfortable with the changes I was making to better our station. The station had a big, high powered signal and a modest four share. I said to him, “Given the power and size of the signal, I’ll need to think about…
Have you ever noticed when something is charted and it’s on an upward or downward trajectory, there are always lots of peaks and valleys to the trend average? You see it with the stock markets, in the stats of professional football players and in TV and radio ratings. Whatever is being graphed will have slight…
I now know people are worried about the future of talk radio. The two blogs I wrote (Ratings Disaster) (Why Nothing Changes) about the format’s dismal June PPM Nielsen ratings went viral and I was contacted “off line” by numerous industry leaders. One station group owner told me his stations can no longer sell…
I guess I hit close to home with my prior blog post on the Ratings Disaster that is today’s talk radio. The June PPM’s suck for talk radio. Hell. The diary markets coming in are bringing little joy. And many in the talk radio industry just sit back and continue on autopilot with the same…
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