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Is Jim McInnes now a Clear Channel employee?

R

radio-darn

Clear Channel has bought the Metro news & traffic network from Westwood One. Locally CBS and the KFMB stations have used Metro employees as essentially staff announcers - usually in sidekick roles - such as Jim McInnes on Jack FM and now KFMB-AM. I believe Kevin Dean at KYXY was at one time actually paid by Metro and CBS 103.7 had in-house news and traffic reporters who worked only for the one station but were Metro employees. Wasn't Laura Cain paid by Shadow when she was first a part of the J&J show?

Of course San Diego being a Metro and CC market also means that CC competitors will be providing spot avails for CC to sell. I don't know what they charge for those short traffic spots, but if you run four an hour it almost seems like a station could sell those themselves, hire their own person to read traffic (and news) and still make a profit.

Shadow/Metro/Air Watch, etc. had an advantage in the olden days because they had the systems set up to collect traffic info, but the truth is those systems were obsolete as soon as broadband internet became available. I started doing traffic reports from home for 103.7 in early 1999 (just after cable internet service started in my neighborhood) and the traffic info freely available from CalTrans and the CHP was much, much better than what I had been getting at the CBS studios via Shadow's proprietary computer network, to say nothing of what I get now even on my iPhone with a free app.

Why let a competitor sell spots on your station in order to have someone read free info from the internet? It seems to me that CC's acquistion of Metro will make it worthwhile to challenge that model.
 
Garrett said:
I thought KFMB used a mix of in-house and Airwatch traffic talent?
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Was McInnes already working for CC then? I didn't realize CC's traffic service in San Diego was on any non-CC stations.
 
hold your horses, the deal, yes announced, has not closed yet. It's bidness as usual. No one has switched companies ... yet.
 
Total Traffic Network as Airwatch, CC Traffic is known as today so far has all of the CC stations (7), LMA (3), BCA (3), KSDS, KPBS, and a group of hispanic stations.

Metro had KFMB (AM/FM), Lincoln Financial (3), CBS (2), Salem (2), and as I recall Univision (2), KPRI, and several hispanic stations as well.

It will be interesting to watch this drama unfold. I am just glad that I don't work for TTN or Metro, that has to be a terrible place to be not knowing your future.
 
600kogo said:
...that has to be a terrible place to be not knowing your future.
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When I worked from them I worked off-site at CBS San Diego, but the couple days I spent working in the Shadow and Metro studios were the worst: it was really a factory job, cranking out the same old traffic news (how many ways can you say "slow at the Merge?") over and over. When Metro bought Shadow, we AFTRA workers from Shadow knew our days were numbered.
 
Well of course back in the old days county, city, state, and federal jobs were all jobs you could never get fired from and people are getting laid off all the times so I guess everyone is at risk of being laid off. And in the old days if the program director didn't like the way you parted your hair you would get fired so maybe things havent changed at all in radio.
 
600kogo said:
Well of course back in the old days county, city, state, and federal jobs were all jobs you could never get fired from and people are getting laid off all the times so I guess everyone is at risk of being laid off. And in the old days if the program director didn't like the way you parted your hair you would get fired so maybe things havent changed at all in radio.
Click to expand...

I've always said that a recession is when everyone has the same insecurity we've always had in radio.
 
Didn't mean to be so snippy. All I'm saying is this particular thread is all about finding who is paying a traffic reporter's salary. I am begging on my knees for an explanation about why should anyone care. We live in a really strange period when Snooki is on the cover of Rolling Stone and ex-radio professionals obsess over how traffic reporters get paid.
 
canyouhearmenow said:
We live in a really strange period when Snooki is on the cover of Rolling Stone and ex-radio professionals obsess over how traffic reporters get paid.
Click to expand...

Amen.
 
canyouhearmenow said:
Didn't mean to be so snippy. All I'm saying is this particular thread is all about finding who is paying a traffic reporter's salary. I am begging on my knees for an explanation about why should anyone care. We live in a really strange period when Snooki is on the cover of Rolling Stone and ex-radio professionals obsess over how traffic reporters get paid.
Click to expand...

Why should anyone care about most of the stuff posted on this forum? You've demonstrated a lack of insight or curiosity beyond your Mickey obsession, so I'll spell it out:

Those lowly traffic reporters beneath consideration: well, they make up a big percentage of the live talent on the radio these days and with the demise of overnight jocks and small town stations with live jocks, these are increasingly the entry jobs for radio announcers (and the career path for some). We saw how Jack used its afternoon traffic reporter - Jim M - as a surrogate live jock and between doing the news on some stations and being turned into quasi-hosts on others, as JM was, the "traffic reporters" have a much different role than back in the days when traffic was just Monica Zech and Steve Springer.
 
Just so I get this straight: I don't agree that traffic reporters now constitute "the big percentage of our radio talent" so I have a "lack of insight and curiosity."

By extension, I guess the people who print logs and schedule commercials need to also be considered "talent" as well.

I don't begrudge traffic reporters anything. Hey, at least they have a job in radio. Most of us on this board are on the outside looking in.

PS: My "obsession" with the Mikey fiasco has to to do with my obsession that his failure will likely lead to the downfall of the entire station which once meant a lot to a lot of people both in and out of radio. That is something you don't understand. To you its just another rock station. Which is fine too. We just have different views of things. This board accommodates all types of people with all kinds of views.
 
Hey you know what radio darn? Jim McInnes is truly a talent, but his talent is getting squandered reading traffic reports. If Clear Channel wanted to use his "talent" they would put him back on KGB where he belongs. That's like saying a graphic artist is using his "talent" by tracing or by painting by numbers. Yes Jim McInness is an accomplished, respected rock radio communicator. And that is what he should be doing again.
 
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