bobdavcav said:
Hmm. Does anyone have any audio from that format, either on 102.3 or 105.9?
All of the air personalities are still around, so you might find something. Gary Walsh is still at CC doing promotions, Heather White is on the KASE morning show, Steve Ethridge is the stadium announcer for Texas State Sports, Roxanne is on the Liquidation Channel (night shift I think).
I believe that Fred is correct about the problems with the River. It was started as a pet project of CC to make them seem less nasty I think. It was started as a completely contemporary Christian format although they acted like it wasn't using the "Family Friendly" tag. Because of their real format, most of their advertising and relationships were with Churches and businesses that were overtly Christian. Ratings didn't really follow and I think that the writing on the wall said that they needed to move more in the direction of Majic (which had also taken on the Family Friendly moniker) so they added music first from Christian bands that had moved into the mainstream and then eventually just softer rock and pop making it more of an AC format. They never really could compete with Majic and they were kind of caught between them and the other Contemporary Christian stations around town. When the CC privatization happened, it was determined that the Austin cluster had to sell off one of its FM's and 105.9 was the weakest of the frequencies. Since 105.9 had made a successful transition to The Beat and it was going great guns, they decided to flip the formats and put The Beat on the 102.3 frequency. The River then only existed until 105.9 was sold to Christa Ministries.
