I recently posted something similar to this on the Providence radio board in a WHJJ thread and wanted to bring it to this board with a Worcester tie-in for everyone’s thoughts.
It seems the CC radio station clusters in New York and New England is rolling out and / or already introduced a news, traffic, weather, and sports morning drive format, rebranding as News Radio. They are implementing it on their heritage AM stations in their markets; Newsradio 920 (WHJJ in Providence), Newsradio 560 (WHYN in Springfield, MA), Newsradio 810 & 103.1 (WGY in Albany, N.Y.), etc.
IMHO, the move to replace Helen Glover at WHJJ was partially due to this "new" morning drive CC format. Helen's show was talk driven where Ron St. Pierre is doing more of an extension of the news rather than a talk show. When I have listened to his show, he almost exclusively covers longer form stories complete with audio reporter sound bites between the T&W together on the 10s. Perhaps this was a decision by corporate to give these smaller markets a "News Radio" station without the expense of being all-news 24/7, although it would be nice if they at least had one local person in each city's newsroom rather than feeding all of the news from the CC hub.
The one exception to this format morning drive tweak in New England and New York seems to be CC's WTAG-AM 580 in Worcester. They still bill themselves as News-Talk 580 and 94.9 in their liners. Although they added T&W together every 10 minutes on the 8s late last year so maybe they plan to do the same at some point. In fact, Andy Dean recently started doing some promos for WTAG during morning drive referring to it as Newsradio 580, Worcester’s news, weather and traffic station.
If WTAG follows suit, I would think Paul Westcott would need to completely change his style. Except for the initial T&W at 5:08 a.m., he very rarely has the break on the 8s (a pet peeve of mine), because he is fielding calls and / or talking on and on and on about the topic for that particular segment.
And if WTAG adopts the CC morning template similar to WHJJ in Providence, it may help WCRN-AM 830 to finally register ratings for the WCRN Morning News with Hank and Sherman. WCRN is still very much a talk station in a.m. drive in spite of the show’s name.
It seems the CC radio station clusters in New York and New England is rolling out and / or already introduced a news, traffic, weather, and sports morning drive format, rebranding as News Radio. They are implementing it on their heritage AM stations in their markets; Newsradio 920 (WHJJ in Providence), Newsradio 560 (WHYN in Springfield, MA), Newsradio 810 & 103.1 (WGY in Albany, N.Y.), etc.
IMHO, the move to replace Helen Glover at WHJJ was partially due to this "new" morning drive CC format. Helen's show was talk driven where Ron St. Pierre is doing more of an extension of the news rather than a talk show. When I have listened to his show, he almost exclusively covers longer form stories complete with audio reporter sound bites between the T&W together on the 10s. Perhaps this was a decision by corporate to give these smaller markets a "News Radio" station without the expense of being all-news 24/7, although it would be nice if they at least had one local person in each city's newsroom rather than feeding all of the news from the CC hub.
The one exception to this format morning drive tweak in New England and New York seems to be CC's WTAG-AM 580 in Worcester. They still bill themselves as News-Talk 580 and 94.9 in their liners. Although they added T&W together every 10 minutes on the 8s late last year so maybe they plan to do the same at some point. In fact, Andy Dean recently started doing some promos for WTAG during morning drive referring to it as Newsradio 580, Worcester’s news, weather and traffic station.
If WTAG follows suit, I would think Paul Westcott would need to completely change his style. Except for the initial T&W at 5:08 a.m., he very rarely has the break on the 8s (a pet peeve of mine), because he is fielding calls and / or talking on and on and on about the topic for that particular segment.
And if WTAG adopts the CC morning template similar to WHJJ in Providence, it may help WCRN-AM 830 to finally register ratings for the WCRN Morning News with Hank and Sherman. WCRN is still very much a talk station in a.m. drive in spite of the show’s name.