Your assessment with regard to "steps taken before the incident" is likely more correct than not. As to "confidence in their policies & practices," if the bit did not involve race, the "no further comment" response you suggest might work... if, in fact the company had taken steps previous to the incident, such as sensitivity awareness regarding gender and color awareness, harassment and discrimination. However, this incident struck the corp of a number of ongoing causes, from #metoo, BLM, voting rights, community awareness, minority employment practices, to downright being responsible broadcasters. The was blood in the water. The scent was picked up by national personalities and fed on by local media for any number of sound journalistic reasons, as well as self-serving reasons.
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97 Rock REALLY steps in it
- Thread starter ckg279
- Start date
And then this happened:
Overreact much?
Cumulus Media fires remaining 97 Rock morning show staff, program director
Overreact much?
Channel 7 is reporting that the rest of the 97 Rock morning team has been fired. Most unfortunate,..Bull and Chris are great broadcasters.
Already mentioned in 97 Rock thread:
Not the way this poster expected it to play out. Cold.
www.wgrz.com
Three more 97 Rock employees fired following racist, sexist on-air comments
Programming director and Buffalo Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame member John Hager, plus radio personalities Rich Gaenzler and Chris Klein, lost their jobs.
www.wgrz.com
Not really. The incident put Buffalo on Corporate Radar. Cumulus had time to re-evaluate. It appears that this PD did not do an air shift. Most are required to these days. A Classic Rock format does not need a PD to shuffle the same 200 songs.
They also realised they were paying 3 people on mornings in Buffalo. The Pandemic certainly hurt revenue and the morning show debacle lost them some more. They can trim payroll and rid themselves of the people responsible for the PR nightmare with one stroke of the pen...
Win/win/win/win....I think.
Just the nature of the Beast. Corporate has spent the last two weeks mulling over this incident. Since they waited until now to terminate 3 more, they certainly scrutinized everything about the Buffalo cluster. That's often bad for the local guys, but they triggered the landmine...
I can gaurantee you when the next ratings book comes out WGRF is going to take a massive hit
You mean they haven't ALREADY?
Consider the trends the last few months:
November: 8.9
December: 8.2
January: 6.3
February: 6.2
Those are not "trends" but full books, each one being 12 total weeks. So November was actually listening in September and October plus November.You mean they haven't ALREADY?
Consider the trends the last few months:
November: 8.9
December: 8.2
January: 6.3
February: 6.2
January includes November and December, and we know that certain formats underperform in December when the changes around the holidays occurs.
And it should be pointed out that those falling shares happened while Lederman was still on the air.
There's no in-house answer to mornings. If they go syndicated things get a lot more interesting for WBUF. I expect tbolt will be applying for Hager's position.
...like claiming
Why? Listeners couldn't care less about all this. Unless they've started playing The Osmonds, I don't expect even a blip in the ratings---at least not much different than they were going to get anyway.
Interesting...so you're saying there's no value in live & local talent?
Not any more. That's the message being sent by corporate radio when they have out-of-market jocks VTing and trying to sound "live and local".
And it seems a bit odd than an Enter...oops, I mean an Audacy station would do a story on a competitor. Guess it was a slow news day.
If you think that 97-Rock listeners won't react to this you're not paying attention to social media posts. Cumulus may try a syndicated morning show there. They're not likely to like the results. This isn't a "more music" morning show. Maybe they'll use syndication as a "palate cleanser" while they come up with something new. If the "live and local doesn't matter" crowd is right, then they've saved some money and lost some ad avails. There's also a chance that they're considering moving Shredd & Ragan over to 97-Rock and going in a new direction with 103.3. 97-Rock has a considerably bigger audience.
Yeah. I agree. I'd suspect that this stations/shows listeners will react in a negative manner relative to what most businesses want. I see far more expressions of dissatisfaction over the station's handling than I see support. I also agree, that there's an opportunity to assume some 'temporary' outside milquetoast replacement to put humdrum distance between a 'permanent' replacement and "the incident." It's all reflecting a spineless control-less management/ownership team... that is likely more concerned with press-of-the-moment social acceptance, rather than creating a differentiated product. Laughable fly-under-the-radar robots, IMO. I support their freedom to do what they want.
Question: What station is "loving" this situation in that it is presenting silver-platter opportunity to pounce and challenge 97Rock?
I have read some of the vile Social Media posts you are talking about. I would like to stay FAR away from these "Fine People". The people of Buffalo have some issues to work out.
Cumulus found a way to cut costs by trimming 4 people. You are correct they might bring the Edge show over. Maybe they can just simulcast Shredd & Ragan on both...
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