It doesn't surprise me because I know how the song goes: "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere."
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Premiere Announces New Hosts For Rush Slot
- Thread starter frankberry
- Start date
In Buck's case, he was born and raised there, and worked for the NYC police department.
Sean Hannity was born in NYC and went to NYU.
Chattanooga has world class broadband, but our Trumpy legislatures haveto protect Comcast so won't let them expand it. (That being said, with iHeart building a hub in Nashville, that would be no problem)
Could make it a more interesting program.
Larry Elder, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and the main office for Salem Radio right wing talkers are based out of Los Angeles, and they are in a place supposedly they loathe too. But then again it's about access to money or in Rush Limbaugh's case when he was in Sacramento it was to get state politicians to pay attention to him at the time.
What about the Rush “guides” who have doing the show since February? My guess is they thought they had a shot at the Rush slot, but apparently not.
As for Clay Travis, I found him intelligent, but annoying on sports shows. IMHO.
As for Clay Travis, I found him intelligent, but annoying on sports shows. IMHO.
I'm sure they knew what the deal was. They continued to do their regular jobs at other stations. None of them quit to become a guide. Several people asked about Mark Steyn, and perhaps he knew he wasn't in consideration.
I'm not thinking Rush had any political ambitions in Sacramento, he just wanted to do a show. He had said though, he didn't think he could be taken seriously nationally without originating from New York.
And a big part of it was the fact that his syndicator at the time (Ed McLaughlin, a former ABC Radio exec) made a deal with WABC that included studio space.
Rush also had to have an offer in a top 10 market to get out of his KFBK contract.
Your comments about how conservative talk affected the AM band overall has some merit, aside from the fact that there are more stations with other formats -- but yeah, there's a stigma, at least to radio people. Not even the plethora of sports, Hispanic, South Asian, Chinese, and religious stations can keep radio people from connecting AM to conservative talk. Probably because Rush et. al. rejuvenated it somewhat.
As for your 55+ comment, when it comes to the two incidents you mentioned, Jan 6th and Charlottesville, I think your demos are off. Over half the Jan 6th insurrectionists were millennials, with GenXers making up another considerable segment, placing the majority of them under age 45-50. Millennials also were a key demographic at the Charlottesville rally.
No real evidence that they listen to talk radio. All of the planning and execution of the riot was done on various online social media platforms.
We'll see what effect the younger hosts have on talk radio. Comments I've read about Ben Shapiro haven't been positive. The base audience prefers the heritage hosts who are more in line with their own demographic. Clay Travis has a similar delivery to Shapiro. That will take some time to get used to.
I have to credit Rush with saving the AM dial. It was rapidly spiraling around the drain when he gained enough popularity to bring a whole set of listeners to the AM dial of whom had not been AM listeners for the most part. While there had been attempts at a national talk network, nothing gained as much momentum as Rush brought to the table. He made the light bulb flip on with thinking a whole format can be build around such a program. From there, Sportstalk had begun quietly and was perplexing owners by not relying on play by play revenues to build revenue and audience. I would say AM without Conservative Talk and hot on it's heels, Sportstalk, would be in a much worse spot than it finds itself. Conservative Talk might have a few more years to be sellable but never underestimate radio in reinventing itself.
By the same token, Rush accelerated the decline of live & local hosts. This was ten years before consolidation. Prior to Rush, stations had live & local hosts in that slot. He came in, and that changed. Before that, the national hosts were after 7PM. Then one by one the dayparts fell, and now we have entire stations running syndicated talk shows.
Rush began to acquire affiliates in the very late 80's, and the two step consolidation process began in the early 90's with "two and two" and concluded in 1996 with up to 8 stations per owner in a markets.
Around 1989, when Rush began to pick up steam, very few smaller markets had full-time talk programming and if they did, it was predominantly based on syndication via networks that even I can not remember the name of.
In so many cases, AMs that were dying had, first, tried a satellite music network, and then, seeing the effects of Rush picked up his show and then got other ones to surround it.
So in many cases, Rush brought talk radio to markets that had not had it before and, in doing so, he created a need for other talk hosts to complete the day's broadcasts. In markets that could afford live local talent, opportunities arose for new talk shows. In fact, that was the era when quite a few music jocks who had grown tired of waiting for a music set to end to read a liner made the jump to talk.
There were also full service AMs that played some form of local personality AC during the day, with talk at night. So no, they may not have been full time talk, but they were largely local during the day, and then they'd carry Bruce Williams from NBC TalkNet or something like that at night.
I can remember an Indianapolis station carrying the audio of the Merv Griffin show (as "The Merv Griffin Radio Show") and that's how bad it got.
Some credit should go to Randy Michaels at WKRC and later WLW (who "taught the Grand Old Lady to dance") and, though he became a pariah among many radio types, likely birthed Contemporary talk radio in the 80s and 90s and tried to bring the demographics down, not only there, but other Jacor stations.
Some credit should go to Randy Michaels at WKRC and later WLW (who "taught the Grand Old Lady to dance") and, though he became a pariah among many radio types, likely birthed Contemporary talk radio in the 80s and 90s and tried to bring the demographics down, not only there, but other Jacor stations.
I'd call it closer to putting AM on life support, but ultimately brain dead.
My recollection is that Rush's biggest achievement was bringing conservative talk to the so-called "housewife" daypart. There was plenty of conservative talk on AM (Barry Farber, Bob Grant, etc.) but mostly later in the day or at night. Edgy daytime talk hadn't been done before and in the process he made political talk mainstream.
I believe he succeeded largely because he made it fun. He had a sense of humor and upbeat delivery. But that changed somewhere along the way when as he morphed into an angry activist. Yet his fans stayed with him. It's difficult to build an audience but also hard to break a listening habit once it's established.
So it seems to me.
I believe he succeeded largely because he made it fun. He had a sense of humor and upbeat delivery. But that changed somewhere along the way when as he morphed into an angry activist. Yet his fans stayed with him. It's difficult to build an audience but also hard to break a listening habit once it's established.
So it seems to me.
That's also what I was partially thinking too. I knew Sacramento is a city where broadcasting talent, directors and managers have stopped over in the past before going to the top 10 media markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Boston where they either become legends in the top 10 markets or have another stop in the top 10 and later become legends on the national networks.
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