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Yikes…97.1 😱

This station is very much in its infancy (to state the obvious).

I also wonder how much planning happened behind the scenes before the flip occurred. A few weeks? Many weeks?

I think we need to wait until we're well into football season to make any reasonable assessment of success or lack thereof. I also suspect the current on-air host lineup will undergo a modification or two over the next year.

As I recall, 95.7 in San Francisco took a long time to see halfway decent in-demo ratings. That station was a very slow build, it seemed, yet it's now in its 15th or 16th year and fares quite well in Men 25 to 54. Perhaps 97.1 in L.A. will follow a similar trajectory.
 
ChannelFlipper said:
Your assuming my criteria, and incorrectly so.
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Success for this station will be based on money. If the powers that be feel it's not successful, there are many changes they can make before they give up.

MarkW said:
As I recall, 95.7 in San Francisco took a long time to see halfway decent in-demo ratings. That station was a very slow build, it seemed, yet it's now in its 15th or 16th year and fares quite well in Men 25 to 54. Perhaps 97.1 in L.A. will follow a similar trajectory.
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That should be the model for success in LA.
 
K.M. Richards said:
I worked with Rome back in 1988 in Santa Barbara, his first professional radio job after graduating from UCSB. (Believe it or not, in addition to doing a sports talk show on our AM, KTMS, he was the traffic reporter during my afternoon drive show on Y97.) So I speak from personal observation when I confirm that he had those "moments" even back then.
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My father was a fan of Jim Rome, precisely because of many of his immature comments, especially those about Jim Everett. For the record, my dad died in 2001, and I never found much liking for Jim Rome or his comments--I preferred Calvin Calherd when I had to listen to sports talk stations. And John Feinstein (who used to appear on NPR's "Morning Edition" when it was hosted by Bob Edwards) was another sports commentator I could stomach.

As to the fate of 97.1's sports format, I think it's still way too early to judge its success or failure. Give it two or three months and see if it pulls in an audience. If it does, then the move was okay. If not, well, it's either back to the KNX-AM simulcast (most likely) or the drawing boards (less likely).
 
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ted chittenden said:
I think it's still way too early to judge its success or failure. Give it two or three months and see if it pulls in an audience. If it does, then the move was okay. If not, well, it's either back to the KNX-AM simulcast (most likely) or the drawing boards (less likely).
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The other thing none of us know is how successful they will be in non-broadcast revenue. Good Karma's entire business model is based on digital. iHeart is also very strong in creating & monetizing non-broadcast content. I think that's where this game will either be won or lost. Not on air.
 
Jstnpspck said:
I believe the decision to not carry Rome (as mentioned in the article quoted above) is simply because they want to be local while all the other sports talk options are national, so much that they actively promote and mention the fact on 97.1 during that daypart
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What's **local**? Does he lives in or near LA? We're not talking Dan Patrick (Connecticut), Chris Russo (New York) or Paul Finebaum (Birmingham).
 
OldiesMaven said:
What's **local**? Does he lives in or near LA?
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Going back to the quote from the station's PD, they want him to originate "in the building."

“One hundred percent it [Jim Rome] was part of the conversation. I had a giant spreadsheet with talent and shows. Obviously, with our relationship with Westwood One Sports, it was brought up,” explained Williams. “I wanted all our people in this building. They are in this studio and conversing around the halls. That means something in the sense of trying to build something brand new.”
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So even if he's just down the highway, that's not what they wanted. Getting someone like that "in the building" takes a very different kind of deal. They may at some point be in a position to do that kind of deal. But they need to build something first.
 
RadioGuy1864 said:
That's A U D A C Y.com--how many years after they ditched Radio.com? 5 years?
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That's my point. When they first changed the name, they gleefully added the website to the TOH IDs on all their stations, forgetting entirely that the audience didn't know about the creative spelling.

So for the first couple of weeks, everyone typing it into their browser used the normal spelling of the word and ended up at the website for a Florida travel agency. (I know this because when it happened, a friend who knows I am in the radio industry asked me why KTWV/The Wave's new web address was going to that agency.)

A couple of weeks later, they bought the domain name from the Florida business and redirected it to audacy.com and all was well again. Big mistake for a company that was all about an aural medium.

And now you know ... the rest of the story.
 
Michael Rivers Kramer said:
KYKS… Los Angeles!
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I mean, there have been worse ideas.

True story:

Back in the 1990s, Clear Channel took 100.3 R&B Oldies and had a listener contest—"send in entries for the new station name and we’ll choose it at random."

(Yeah....sure.)

The announcement came: It was “MEGA 100”.

That night, Phil Hendrie did the first 15 minutes of his show on KFI about how relieved everyone in the building was that, miraculously, the winning entry just happened to be the number one name for that format on radio stations all over the country.

“I mean, what if they’d pulled out the random winner and it was “Asshole 100”? Man, we dodged a bullet!”
 
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