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What radio station in Chicago will change format first in 2026

Schroedingers Cat said:
If Cumulus liked a conservative message, they wouldn't have removed Michael DelGiorno from WWTN Nashville. They would have syndicated him, and he would be on his all time favorite station now, WLS. Now he's on 107 radio stations, with Premier Radio Networks, iHeart Media, many of which compete with Cumulus, but not in Chicago yet.
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Michael's Dad was a pretty successful radio host, primarily at WWL in New Orleans and also at WIND Radio in Chicago. Sounds
like he's doing well in syndication with over 100 stations.
 
ILOVERADIO said:
Michael's Dad was a pretty successful radio host, primarily at WWL in New Orleans and also at WIND Radio in Chicago. Sounds
like he's doing well in syndication with over 100 stations.
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Well, a lot of those stations he's on are owned by iHeart in small to medium markets where it doesn't want to pay for a live morning host anymore.

Or they are in the West, where the station has decided to run DelGiorno after the ending of Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and the start of the local morning show.
 
JoeU said:
Translator FM's in a big city environment are pretty useless. Between the intermod created by all the downtown Chicago RF sources plus the digital hash which is an audible whine heard between stations with HD signals, the translators are worse copy than the noisy AM's they are ment to help. Translators are vastly overrated.
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There is an element of urban density that certainly works against the low power of translators in the largest markets. Intermod at shared sites is definitely an issue too.

But in Chicago, Washington, NYC, the bigger problem is just that the band is just so full. The East Coast and NE are so starved for spectrum that you can only jam in some kind of lower powered directional translator, if that. And it will be on a noisy channel (in these areas they nearly all are very noisy from nearby adjacent markets) with full power stations in the region that will cause havoc on a regular basis. Add to that that these largest markets are geographically huge so a single translator can't even hope to cover it all with in-car coverage.

In small-medium markets, translator can do okay, think about the two in Indianapolis for The Fan that perform very well in the ratings. Las Vegas, Austin, Jacksonville, etc. all have multiple translators that do quite well with 250 watts or even 99. Even sprawling Phoenix has a few.

What do all these have in common? Compelling niche. programming, with usable fm channels with tall, centrally located mountains or towers so that the translators cover reasonably well 20+ miles for in-car listening. In the case of KNAI's translator in Phoenix, it is on South Mountain with most of the other FMs and TV and does fine.
 


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