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105.3 Sports Talk

Gregg said:
I'm not sure you can blame the owners.  Maybe you have to blame people in the market.  Clear Channel owns an Alternative station in Denver that's #1 and an Adult Alternative station, KBCO, that's #3.   CBS's KROQ Los Angeles is one of the country's top 10 earning stations.  Clear Channel's Alternative station in Houston, KTBZ, is #7 and the top station for English-dominent young men in the market. 

Sorry, but most men in Oklahoma City are listening to Country (3 stations!) or Hard Rock/Classic Rock (3 stations!).  Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  I think in this case, people in OKC listen to safe, predictable formats, not because owners are too stupid or timid to put an adventurous format on the air.  On a Saturday night in downtown Oklahoma City, is the line outside a new Asian Fusion restaurant longer or the line outside Applebee's?

So now Oklahoma City has FIVE Sports stations...

640 KWPN  ESPN
1340 KGHM  Fox Sports (although no where on their website do they mention Fox)
1400 KREF  Yahoo Sports (although no where on their website do they mention Yahoo)
98.1 WWLS  Local with some ESPN Programming
105.3 KINB  CBS Sports

The only Sports networks that are missing are NBC Sports and ESPN Deportes.  You wonder how long the two 1000 watt high-on-the-AM-dial sports stations, KGHM and KREF, can continue to afford local hosts if the sports audience is split among five stations, the others with better signals.
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You definitely have points here, but most of it is simply based on the typical outdated stereotype of OKC. If you lived here you would know that there is no Applebees downtown and that local restaurants are quite popular. The truth is OKC had much better stations before Cumulus bought out Citadel and sabotaged the stations. Nearby Tulsa doesn't have Cumulus in their market and their stations are much, much better. Other Cumulus markets have terrible stations just like OKC does. Cumulus is all about running cheap, usually nationally syndicated stations.
 
bchristi said:
You definitely have points here, but most of it is simply based on the typical outdated stereotype of OKC. If you lived here you would know that there is no Applebees downtown and that local restaurants are quite popular. The truth is OKC had much better stations before Cumulus bought out Citadel and sabotaged the stations. Nearby Tulsa doesn't have Cumulus in their market and their stations are much, much better. Other Cumulus markets have terrible stations just like OKC does. Cumulus is all about running cheap, usually nationally syndicated stations.
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I really can't tell much of a difference between the Cumulus stations now and when they were owned by Citadel. Of course, I never cared for Wild 104.9, which probably has seen some changes because of how Cumulus does CHR. KATT sounds pretty much they way it always has, and KYIS and Bob sound about like they did the last few years of Citadel ownership. Citadel really wasn't a very good operator either, at least not after Farid and company took it over.

I would also disagree that the Tulsa stations are significantly better. There are some stations in Tulsa that are better than their counterparts in OKC. The Cox cluster, for example, sounds great and would stack up well against any large market station. Not too long ago, that cluster was one of the most profitable in the entire company, including the large and major market ones. There's a reason. It's run very well. However, the rest of the market is nothing to write home about. There are a few good stations here and there, but most are every bit as forgettable as their counterparts in OKC or anywhere else.

When it comes to Cumulus, they're definitely about running things on the cheap. While they do have centralized brand managers, some of whom exert an undue amount of control over the stations they consult, very few of their stations run Cumulus Media Networks syndicated programming a majority of the time. They have a few that run the True Oldies Channel, and most of their country stations and CHR's run syndicated programming in the 7 PM to midnight time slot. However, you don't see many other music stations running wall-to-wall syndication, though some of them do a ton of local voicetracking.
 
Hey, I'm no fan of Cumulus. Last year, as CEO Lew Dickey was raising his salary from $3 million to $19 million, the company was massively cutting personnel. At my friend's Cumulus station in a medium market, they cut the fulltime air staff from six people to three. They got rid of the morning sidekick, the evening guy and the overnight guy. I think that's a sin, to give the CEO a 600% raise while slashing everywhere else. No one's going to tell me he would have left Cumulus if the board of directors didn't increase his compensation by $16 million. Or that Cumulus is serving its listeners and advertisers by slashing the fulltime staff in half.

But Cumulus doesn't own every radio station. Other owners could have tried more adventurous formats. But local listeners in OKC didn't support them. There are several independently owned FM stations that could be played with but the other owners also don't try anything with them. The Catholic Church just bought an FM station at 97.3. No commercial owner outbid the Archbishop. I really don't know any other sizable market in the country where the Catholic Church owns a commercial FM frequency.

And what was that station doing before the sale? Yep, Classic Country. It was OKC's fourth Country station. That tells you something.
 
Gregg said:
Hey, I'm no fan of Cumulus. Last year, as CEO Lew Dickey was raising his salary from $3 million to $19 million, the company was massively cutting personnel. At my friend's Cumulus station in a medium market, they cut the fulltime air staff from six people to three. They got rid of the morning sidekick, the evening guy and the overnight guy. I think that's a sin, to give the CEO a 600% raise while slashing everywhere else. No one's going to tell me he would have left Cumulus if the board of directors didn't increase his compensation by $16 million. Or that Cumulus is serving its listeners and advertisers by slashing the fulltime staff in half.

But Cumulus doesn't own every radio station. Other owners could have tried more adventurous formats. But local listeners in OKC didn't support them. There are several independently owned FM stations that could be played with but the other owners also don't try anything with them. The Catholic Church just bought an FM station at 97.3. No commercial owner outbid the Archbishop. I really don't know any other sizable market in the country where the Catholic Church owns a commercial FM frequency.

And what was that station doing before the sale? Yep, Classic Country. It was OKC's fourth Country station. That tells you something.
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Cumulus is the dominant corporation in OKC radio and has six FM stations, the most in the market. ClearChannel's stations, with the exception of classic rock 94.7 the Brew, aren't bad. Top 40 KJ 103 is number one in the market and is the only station playing contemporary hits. Every corporation though with stations in OKC is trying to get a piece of the sports and classic rock pie. Right now OKC has the right amount of country stations but there are FIVE classic rock stations and the same amount of sports stations. That can't be sustainable long-term. Ten years ago OKC had only one classic rock station. The dial was far more balanced then.

OKC needs an alternative rock station, which can work if done well, and also needs a quality rhythmic top 40 or urban station.
 
bchristi said:
Gregg said:
Hey, I'm no fan of Cumulus. Last year, as CEO Lew Dickey was raising his salary from $3 million to $19 million, the company was massively cutting personnel. At my friend's Cumulus station in a medium market, they cut the fulltime air staff from six people to three. They got rid of the morning sidekick, the evening guy and the overnight guy. I think that's a sin, to give the CEO a 600% raise while slashing everywhere else. No one's going to tell me he would have left Cumulus if the board of directors didn't increase his compensation by $16 million. Or that Cumulus is serving its listeners and advertisers by slashing the fulltime staff in half.

But Cumulus doesn't own every radio station. Other owners could have tried more adventurous formats. But local listeners in OKC didn't support them. There are several independently owned FM stations that could be played with but the other owners also don't try anything with them. The Catholic Church just bought an FM station at 97.3. No commercial owner outbid the Archbishop. I really don't know any other sizable market in the country where the Catholic Church owns a commercial FM frequency.

And what was that station doing before the sale? Yep, Classic Country. It was OKC's fourth Country station. That tells you something.
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Cumulus is the dominant corporation in OKC radio and has six FM stations, the most in the market. ClearChannel's stations, with the exception of classic rock 94.7 the Brew, aren't bad. Top 40 KJ 103 is number one in the market and is the only station playing contemporary hits. Every corporation though with stations in OKC is trying to get a piece of the sports and classic rock pie. Right now OKC has the right amount of country stations but there are FIVE classic rock stations and the same amount of sports stations. That can't be sustainable long-term. Ten years ago OKC had only one classic rock station. The dial was far more balanced then.

OKC needs an alternative rock station, which can work if done well, and also needs a quality rhythmic top 40 or urban station.
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Eh...alternative is truly a dying genre. In the past 20 years, mainstream alternative has been tried in OKC twice and failed. Ferris O'Brien's vision of obscure alternative has been tried twice and failed. I'm not sure what could be done differently with the format to make it a success.
 
I wouldn't consider Ferris a failure. He seems to keep finding ways to be on the air (now across the state on public radio) - and kudos to him.
 
The Spy is alive and well. has not failed. reach an insane more amount of people right now than he did with the 900 watt. i can now get them in Tulsa, and the Tulsa signal reaches out as far north as Joplin and into Kansas. and Full OKC Coverage. The Spy just needs to be more on during the day, perhaps all day Saturdays could go to The Spy.
 
DJ: I think the idea here is that Ferris' "The Spy" has proven itself to not be a commercially-viable option, for the most part. It lives on with some success is seems in the non-comm world. KOSU certainly has more reach than the 900 watt hair-dryer north of the OKC metro. There is no doubt that more of his "faithful" can now get the service when it's on the air. (timewise)
 
stevensonair said:
I wouldn't consider Ferris a failure. He seems to keep finding ways to be on the air (now across the state on public radio) - and kudos to him.
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I wasn't suggesting that Ferris was a failure. I was stating that his brand of alternative programming fulltime was a commercial failure, which is a statement that is hard to refute.
 
DjNotNot said:
The Spy is alive and well. has not failed. reach an insane more amount of people right now than he did with the 900 watt. i can now get them in Tulsa, and the Tulsa signal reaches out as far north as Joplin and into Kansas. and Full OKC Coverage. The Spy just needs to be more on during the day, perhaps all day Saturdays could go to The Spy.
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Again...he has done this...twice...and it failed both times. Public Radio is the perfect place for The Spy. That format can't tread water in commercial radio.
 
Exactly. At KOSU it doesn't have to have mass appeal. In fact, it's more like window-dressing for the cool factor, etc. Even if people don't listen much, it's "cool" that KOSU facilitates another musical alternative on the FM airwaves, at a time in the day that it doesn't hurt their overall operation much. Commercially, it was a struggle to be able to pay for expenses plus the cost of acquisition. The last part was the clincher for the last failure. Ferris was able to pay the bills with effectively corporate supporters, but there wasn't enough there to pay the note on the stupid money it took to really buy the stick. His account advisors did him a huge favor, even if he doesn't appreciate getting told NO. 105.3 should sell for well under a million, but it took much more than that to buy it from the current owners. I'm happy for Ferris and his KOSU hosts. So far it's worked out quite well from both parties.
 
Still, i would like to see The Spy branch out into doing weekends all music during the day on KOSU. KCRW is an example of that, they are NPR but during weekends it is 100% music that is how i wish it was. Then, that would enable Ferris to maybe throw on more daytime live Djs and shows. the "Alternative" brand may be a dying breed, but indie rock is in full effect. And at its biggest peak at this very moment.
 
Indie will not work as a commercial format that is agreed. especially since it is for Independent Bands who don't make much money themselves in this day and age. Stations like the Spy will only exist with support from die hard listeners.
 
Maybe Ferris should consider donating a nice translator to KOSU in the metro and ask for their HD3. He could then put that translator on one of the tall towers, over-height, at 250 watts, let's say. KOSU has enough signal over most of the metro to make it a "fill-in". 250 watts from over 1000ft. can do some pretty wild things... He then would effectively have his own little wireless iPod he's always wanted ;D .
 
the 95 Watt Translator in Tulsa covers the whole city. those Low powers can go quite a distance, as long as the person receiving it has a half decent FM rig to listen on.
 
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