Air America off WHAT Philadelphia???

[radiophile]

This from today's Philadelphia Daily News:

"People Paper columnist Elmer Smith kicks off a new show for WHAT 1340 AM on Monday afternoon. Called "The Exchange," will air weekdays from 1 to 5. Smith is excited about the new gig, saying the show will be a place where ideas are shared by guests, forums, and callers and won't just be him going off with his own views."

WHAT airs Franken and Rhodes live. This show would pre-empt them. Earlier, it was announced that a new live and local show would air Fridays from 5-7 pm. Speculation was, intially, that it would just cut into Rhodes show one day a week.

Could progressive talk be appearing elsewhere in Philly starting Monday?

 

[FightingIrish]

> This from today's Philadelphia Daily News:
>
> "People Paper columnist Elmer Smith kicks off a new show for
> WHAT 1340 AM on Monday afternoon. Called "The Exchange,"
> will air weekdays from 1 to 5. Smith is excited about the
> new gig, saying the show will be a place where ideas are
> shared by guests, forums, and callers and won't just be him
> going off with his own views."
>
> WHAT airs Franken and Rhodes live. This show would pre-empt
> them. Earlier, it was announced that a new live and local
> show would air Fridays from 5-7 pm. Speculation was,
> intially, that it would just cut into Rhodes show one day a
> week.
>
> Could progressive talk be appearing elsewhere in Philly
> starting Monday?
>

AAR on WHAT-AM is a joke. They only air two shows, mixing Franken and Rhodes in with a virtually all-urban talk format, and their signal is terrible. It languishes at the bottom of the ratings most likely due to this.<P ID="signature">______________
The Liberal Talk Radio Update</P>

 

[k9ez]

> > This from today's Philadelphia Daily News:
> >
> > "People Paper columnist Elmer Smith kicks off a new show
> for
> > WHAT 1340 AM on Monday afternoon. Called "The Exchange,"
> > will air weekdays from 1 to 5. Smith is excited about the
> > new gig, saying the show will be a place where ideas are
> > shared by guests, forums, and callers and won't just be
> him
> > going off with his own views."
> >
> > WHAT airs Franken and Rhodes live. This show would
> pre-empt
> > them. Earlier, it was announced that a new live and local
> > show would air Fridays from 5-7 pm. Speculation was,
> > intially, that it would just cut into Rhodes show one day
> a
> > week.
> >
> > Could progressive talk be appearing elsewhere in Philly
> > starting Monday?
> >
>
> AAR on WHAT-AM is a joke. They only air two shows, mixing
> Franken and Rhodes in with a virtually all-urban talk
> format, and their signal is terrible. It languishes at the
> bottom of the ratings most likely due to this.
>


The terrible signal issuse that is brought up all of he time is getting old (No offense directed to you Irish). You take a look at a stations like Bostons little WJIB which runs a whole 250 watts day and whopping TEN watts at night and they do OK in the ratings beating out a number fo FM stations. If the programming is good people will listen.

 

[fybush]

> The terrible signal issuse that is brought up all of he time
> is getting old (No offense directed to you Irish). You take
> a look at a stations like Bostons little WJIB which runs a
> whole 250 watts day and whopping TEN watts at night and they
> do OK in the ratings beating out a number fo FM stations.
> If the programming is good people will listen.

Yeah, but they have to be able to listen, first. WJIB is a most unusual 250-watt station. It has a great spot low on the dial, an excellent transmitter facility and a distinct lack of co- and adjacent-channel interference. When I lived in the Boston suburb of Waltham, about 10 miles west of WJIB, the station put in signal strengths that exceeded some of the "bigger" Boston AMs. WJIB still doesn't cover the entire Boston metro - in fact, no AM does, except for WBZ - but it puts a usable (>10 mV/m) signal over probably 65-70% of the metro's population with its daytime facilities, and still reaches probably 30% of the metro with its night signal.

WHAT, by contrast, is not only a class C ("graveyard") station but a significantly substandard one. It's massively short-spaced to one co-channel facility, WRAW Reading, which limits its signal to the northwest substantially. To the southeast, co-channel WMID Atlantic City is not shortspaced, but it does benefit from a salt-water conductivity path up Delaware Bay that limits WHAT's signal in that direction. WHWH 1350 Trenton is a further limiter to the northeast. The thing gets maybe a quarter of the reach that the 1340 in k9ez's home market does. It's not pretty.

The result is a signal that simply doesn't exist in most of the places where the potential listeners to the format would be, and with no room for any real improvement short of moving the programming to a signal that more potential listeners could actually hear. <P ID="signature">______________
Tower Site Calendar 2006 JUST RELEASED! - <a target="_blank" href=http://www.fybush.com/nerw.html#calendar>www.fybush.com</a></P>

 

[mwebster]

Where goes progressive talk in Philly

As of tomorrow afternoon, the progressive talk format is almost completely unrepresented in the number six market. I say "almost" because a station in the far Western suburbs does carry Ed Schultz, but this station can be heard in only one of eight counties in the Philadelphia MSA market.

The Philadelphia Inquirer picked up the story this afternoon. The story quotes an AAR spokesperson as saying AAR is talking to another station (singular). The problem is a lack of real estate on the Philadelphia radio dial. The possibilities are high frequency - low power AM's with signals as bad as or worse than WHAT's (and some of them are daytime only). Technically, progressive talk gets clearance in Philly; practically, most people still can't receive it.

These stations are getting by with brokered programming, a safe business strategy. Flipping to progressive talk and getting sales people out selling spots means taking a chance.

The one real opportunity for a good stick for progressive talk radio slipped away last month when WPEN 950 AM, announced they were flipping from a failed Real Oldies format to Sports-Talk (with a well established sports talk station already in the market).

If AAR does get in with one of the remaining weak and non-performing stations in Philly, unfortunately the station will probably just automate and take AAR's network feed and Philly still won't get a chance to hear Miller, Schultz and Hartmann - let alone any local progressive talk hosts.

From my review of local Arbitron numbers: Progressive talk stations with half-way decent signals that "cherry pick" progressive talk shows (not simply take whatever AAR feeds)and also do local programming do well. The rest are at the bottom of the Arbitron tables. Even if AAR gets some clearance in Philly, it looks like what I just described here won't happen. The likelihood then becomes another weak station plugs into AAR's satellite feed and not much happens and somebody takes this as evidence the progressive talk format can't work.