In today's Standard Speaker it was reported the Make Believe Room has been cancelled. According to Valovich, he was offerred the morning drive but declined. WAZL came in with a bang but is now down to a whimper. A lot of the programming is satellite now except for morning and afternoon drive. I wonder what happened to Route 81 in the last 2 years. They started with Pat Ward and Rick Saullo and even had a former WNEP reporter doing the news. Then Ward was let go and Saullo quit. Then they got Mike Naydock from KAB only to lose him to KAB a few months later. They also had a Beatles program on the weekend which apparently is on KAB I believe now. I used to listen to the news updates in the morning but have recently stopped because they report very little anymore. I don't know if Route 81 Radio is stripping costs but with a group that started off with local being very important has cut local back to almost nothing. As a Hazleton resident it is very frustrating. Here we had a station that was promising more local content and now we are down to less than 12 hours a day during the weekdays.
On a related note Valovich mentions that they are looking at going AC as a format (I thought they already were largely AC?). Also at night when they have the satellite programming, after commercial breaks they sometimes have these long pauses with dead air. I hate to be overly critical, but I saw great potential in WAZL and it seems Route 81 is doing what every other big media company has done in the area and squeezing out local programming more and more.
On a related note Valovich mentions that they are looking at going AC as a format (I thought they already were largely AC?). Also at night when they have the satellite programming, after commercial breaks they sometimes have these long pauses with dead air. I hate to be overly critical, but I saw great potential in WAZL and it seems Route 81 is doing what every other big media company has done in the area and squeezing out local programming more and more.