WGSO sold

[Olfart]

Here is the skinny on Ron Hunter for oldiesstation. Contacting him may present some challenges.....

http://blog.nola.com/davewalker/2008/07/ron_hunter_funeral_set_for_thu.html

Olfart

 

[john026]

genehughes, sorry to burst your fan bubble of WGSO...but everything I wrote is true. For further proof, WGSO has now laid off several more workers and have their hosts doing their own board operating. They are down to a skeleton crew...the place makes the Titanic look welcoming. Don't know how much longer Jeff C will last either. They have no sales, they sell their airtime to ANYONE with a pulse, and they have ZERO RATINGS. The place is a joke and the bald headed racist GM they have running it is a pariah. He runs decent people off, his idea of creative management is to fire people...that doesn't take talent, it just takes an eraser to a bottom line.

 

[nolaradiobuff]

Everytime I see this post with new information I hope/wish that the title were true. It just goes to show the sad state of AM radio when you have 2 stations (WGSO, WIST) in a solid, improving market, that are so poorly programmed and so poorly thought of in the advertising community that they can't be sold. An AM station in Valdosta, Georgia was just sold, so there are still people out there buying AMs. But, in New Orleans, we get two wasted signals with poor management, low budget (or in the case of WGSO - no budget) staffs, and two stations that nobody wants.

Add that in with the poorly programmed and managed clusters from Citadel and Clear Channel and it's a pretty sad state for radio in New Orleans.

 

[mimo]

Was there a time when WGSO was successful? When was it and what did it air? What kind of ratings did it have at it's peak?

 

[nedryerson]

I have an idea. If they can’t bring back Wilkie, how about bringing back Mike Longman, Vance DeGeneres, Bruce Kramer, and maybe Bob Dabney. That would work.

 

[Ronn]

Mimo....immediatly after WDSU was sold to Broad Street Communications in the mid 70's and changed call letters to WGSO, they brought in Terrell Metheny as pd for a short time who instituted a combination of music, news and talk. Believe it or not, the station became #1 for a while. The music, called "The Gentle Sound" was on mid days and overnights. News blocks were in drive time and talk in the evening. It defied all general wisdom, was truly unique and very successful. WGSO hasn't fared so well since. ;D

 

[J Alex Bowab]

There is really no connection between the WGSO you speak of and the WGSO of today. WDSU AM 1280 changed to WGSO about 1973 when the wDSU TV and radio stations were sold separately. It stood for Gulf SOuth and Gentle SOund at various times ... was at times mostly pop adult music, and other times mostly news/talk. In the 80s, 1280 ditched the calls and became WMKJ, Magic 1280 with a r&b oldies format (Heart and Soul), then WODT (for Who Dat) with various formats. The WGSO calls had been out of use for some time.....

Then 990 AM, which had been WJMR, WNNR and WYAT, picked up the WGSO calls after they had been out of service for several years. I think this was in the early 90s. So the original WGSO (1280) and the current holder of the calls (990) were two different frequencies, two different owners, and there was I'm sure a time lapse of several years between one station's abandonment of the calls and another one picking them up (probably figuring that there was at least some familiarity with the calls since the previous user of the calls had done fairly well with them).

 

[J Alex Bowab]

I looked at Wikipedia, and that source indicates the WGSO call letters were dropped by 1280 AM in 1985, and picked up by 990 AM in 1993 ... so there's almost a decade between the two incarnations of "WGSO" ...

and with that in mind, up above mimo asked was WGSO ever successful. Which GSO are we talking about? I think the 1280 version did well in the 70s, but the 990 version never had the signal to be a major player (originally 250 watts day, later 1100 D/400 N, but on an AM tower atop a building rather than one with a traditional ground system).

Wasn't the 990 version of GSO intended to be a supplement to the City Business publication?

 

[Ronn]

Alex, you are quite right and might be interested in one little twist. When Broad Street Communications from Hartford, CN bought WDSU they had to change the call letters because the TV kept the DSU handle. While driving from the airport to the Quarter on their first visit, the Broad Street folks noticed a bill board with GSO prominently displayed. They thought it meant something and decided those would be great call letters with local appeal. Turns out they meant nothing, were a short time campaign for someone...seems like, perhaps, a utility?? Not too long after Broad Street bought WGSO, when Al Smith was gm, your friend and partner Bob O'Brien was sales manager and Terrell Metheny was pd, WGSO became #1, I believe, 12+ for at least one book. This was with "The Gentle Sound" and the news blocks mixed with talk. It was then, that they took on the New Orleans Jazz and began to do more sports which turned out to be their downfall. Too much expense for the revenues that could be generated.

 

[J Alex Bowab]

Broad Street evolved into INSILCO ... used to hear them include that company name in the legal ID, believe it was an insurance conglom.

And the WDSU FM calls WQUE survived through 38 years of beautiful music, then top 40, then hip hop ... same calls the whole time.

Yes, Bob O'B was my friend and partner ... RIP. He started in radio at WSMB, then WIXO 98.5.

Bob used to talk about WGSO in the early days calling itself "GUT Radio, where New Orleans gets the message." They did a focus group and found that to be a total turnoff, so they moved on to some of the other monikers.

There were a lot of AM/FM/TV combos in the earlier years, but one by one, they were broken up ... in many cases, the radio station kept the calls, and the TV got a new set of letters ... logic was that radio was known by its call letters, and TV was known by its channel number, so its call letters were not relevant, as long as the TV could call itself "Channel _ " - didn't make no never mind - ... examples, WREC Memphis radio kept the calls, TV became WREG ... Nashville WLAC TV became WTVF but let the radio keep the calls.

One weird situation is WWL ... the AM and TV went to separate owners, but apparently the two licensees made some sort of deal that each one kept the calls ... and for a long time now, WWL AM and WWL TV had separate owners. Go figure.

 

[J Alex Bowab]

I remember the Gentle Sound ... midday and evening, newsblocks AM/PM drive ... and Dan Milham was one of the announcers who executed it ... also a guy named Bruce, forget last name.

You talked about GSO spending a lot of money on sports broadcast rights ... one year they outbid WWL for the Saints ... must have paid a ton of $ for that ... understand they argued that stations out there in places like Hattiesburg, Mobile, Baton Rouge would not carry the games because WWL's penetration into those distant markets discouraged those stations from carrying the games, maintaining they did not have an "exclusive" in their city ... so if the games went on a lesser powered station that did not boom into those outlying cities, they could get more stations out in the boondocks to carry the games. Some logic there, but I don't believe this arrangement lasted very long. I think they figured on losing money on the deal, but thought it would pay off in image enhancement of the station.

One problem came up ... 1280 was DA-D, and weak in St Tammany ... one year a lot of Arbitron diaries landed in their null area, the book was bad, and there was talk about re-doing the AM site to eliminate this achilles heel.

 

[fybush]

There were a lot of AM/FM/TV combos in the earlier years, but one by one, they were broken up ... in many cases, the radio station kept the calls, and the TV got a new set of letters ... logic was that radio was known by its call letters, and TV was known by its channel number, so its call letters were not relevant, as long as the TV could call itself "Channel _ " - didn't make no never mind - ... examples, WREC Memphis radio kept the calls, TV became WREG ... Nashville WLAC TV became WTVF but let the radio keep the calls.

One weird situation is WWL ... the AM and TV went to separate owners, but apparently the two licensees made some sort of deal that each one kept the calls ... and for a long time now, WWL AM and WWL TV had separate owners. Go figure.

By the time Loyola sold WWL, the rules had changed. It's now OK for separate owners to continue using the same calls even after ownership splits. There are lots of them these days - George Flinn has WHBQ (and WHBQ-FM), while WHBQ-TV is under different ownership, just to name one example. This wasn't allowed in the days when WREC or WLAC or WDSU split.

 

[J Alex Bowab]

Thanks for the clarification. Am I correct that the sharing of calls in the same market is permissible only if both licensees consent to the arrangement? After all, if one licensee committed some act of malfeasance and earned a bad reputation in the market, it could reflect adversely on the other one's facility.

 

[fybush]

Thanks for the clarification. Am I correct that the sharing of calls in the same market is permissible only if both licensees consent to the arrangement? After all, if one licensee committed some act of malfeasance and earned a bad reputation in the market, it could reflect adversely on the other one's facility.

Correct. If I'm "WQQQ" on AM, you can't be "WQQQ-FM" or "WQQQ-TV" unless I approve it.

Only the earliest owner of the base call has to approve subsequent uses - so if I own WQQQ(AM) and WQQQ-TV, and I sell WQQQ-TV to someone else and allow them to keep WQQQ-TV, it's still up to me (and only me) if I want to allow someone else to be WQQQ-FM, or if I want to use the calls myself.