I don't know where I'm going with this but in the early days of the medium, shows were aired live from the west coast twice, once for the east coast and three hours later for the west coast!My point is CBS's post-Stern morning drive strategy was a disaster. I did not say Stern's replacements and the radio medium were necessarily incompatible in all respects.
There's nothing that could've been done with Roth that would've made him a successful morning drive host in multiple large city markets on the stations that previously aired Stern. Thus, he was a terrible choice. Square peg meets round hole. As a nighttime host of a music-driven daypart on classic rock stations, he might've been effective.
Rover's sophomoric, lowest common denominator, very fake show was a terrible choice for WCKG in Chicago, the former WKRK-FM in Detroit, and other stations in the central U.S. The ratings are proof. WNCX Cleveland lucked out because their sister station in Cleveland was the flagship for Rover at the time, so they were able to escape that fate.
I never heard Carolla's morning show (other than brief snippets), but I do certainly agree he is a talented media personality and comedian. He was the one selection that had potential to succeed. The problem is - he was based on the west coast. That circumstance limited live morning drive distribution opportunities. If he were based in NYC and given proper support, the outcome certainly could've been much different. I suspect he would not have wanted to relocate to the east coast, though. I would love to know if CBS Radio brass ever attempted to make an inquiry along those lines.
Not that I'm aware of (leaving out the all-news outlets
I don't think these are fair comparisons. "Guy talk" virtually disappeared once major markets switched from diary to PPM. Howard was never tracked by PPM when he was on terrestrial, if I recall correctly. Chances are if Howard had stuck around as long as Kevin & Bean did, he would have lost affiliates by the hundreds over the years.
Free FM launched around the same time as Arbitron was rolling out PPM. PPM did not act kindly toward talk formats in general, which ultimately doomed the stations. It would have doomed Stern as well, if he was still on those stations.
When stations grew in PPM, it was due to P2 and P3 lighter listeners who often neglected to write those stations in the diary. Stern had no secondary listeners; you loved him or hated the show. While he was generally second in LA to one of the Spanish language stations, I estimate he would have been 8th at best in PPM.
Stations that depended on long TSL and which had few secondary listeners did poorly in PPM. In many cases, those were certain morning shows and many talk shows that were on stations that were not well rounded like WLW or WSB.
It was because they had no P2 and P3 listeners, and like all stations we found that nobody listened all day and the PPM showed all the breaks and interruptions….
