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What's with 3WZ

Sports? What are they thinking? YAHOO sports? Another station does a live morning show and then is mostly canned stuff? There isn't enough of that on the local dial already? Hearing some coach from somewhere in Louisiana ain't what I want at ten in the morning. What about you? Saving grace: CBS News, though not enough of it. Note that as of today, 9/2/11 there's no program schedule on the website. Know what? I'd hide it, too. What are you thinking?!
 
As a Penn State alum I always keep an eye on SC and wondered how long it would take after Arbitron dropped the market for stations to realize they were playing a game that didn't count anymore. I guess the answer is a couple of years. The new game is local direct sales and locals have never cared about ratings. They buy what they like and I gotta guess that a lot of them in State College like sports. PSU is a big deal.

The big guys like KYW and KDKA do well with CBS News. Yahoo Sports is the old Sporting News network. Not a bad pick if ESPN is already taken by an AM, as they are in most markets. Are these guys "live" in PM Drive? Do they have any decent sports talent?

This stuff is sweeping the major markets where rockers and ACs are dropping like flies, but most small-market players don't have the money to pull it off.
 
CBS owns KYW and KDKA each of which does a fine job of covering its city. The answer to your question about "live in the afternoon" is "sort of." 3WZ has been doing a local sports show in the late afternoon for quite awhile now. It's purchased or bartered from a local group of freelancers, some professional-sounding, others not. But by my lights, acquiring local programs from an outside source is the same as acquiring syndicated programs from an outside source, just a smaller one.

Two full time sports stations, and two or three others that do part time sports (Occasional games on WRSC, at least they have been for awhile, and stuff on WBLF and WPHB.) That's a lot of sports, especially when you consider that most everyone here gets NFL and MLB networks on cable or satellite, and a bunch of different flavors of ESPN.
 
Stranger said:
The answer to your question about "live in the afternoon" is "sort of." 3WZ has been doing a local sports show in the late afternoon for quite awhile now. It's purchased or bartered from a local group of freelancers, some professional-sounding, others not.

If they've "been doing a local sports show in the late afternoon for quite awhile now," this shouldn't be much of a surprise. If the guys doing it are local and talking about local sports, that's all the listeners care about. They don't know or care how they are paid. I'll bet $10 that no one in SC during afternoon drive is a fulltimer.

Not to pick on State College. Anywhere in America you can grab a booth at McDonalds and have a meeting of all the fulltime radio station air talents who aren't doing morning drive. Everybody else is either part-time, freelance or doing voice-tracks for $7.25 an hour. If you're the exception, you might be eating your Big Mac alone.

Last time I was in LA on a Saturday, every big news, talk or sports station was running informercials all day long. KNX. KFWB. All of them. In Los Angeles. If you all in Altoona and State College still have fulltime air talents on the air in any daypart outside of weekday mornings, you should be counting your blessings.

In 2011 radio stations aren't run like they were in 1991. Things have changed. I noticed in a thread below this one that somebody switched another State College FM from AC to rock, becoming the third rocker in town. At a time when rock icons like WBCN and WYSP have fallen by the wayside, this is amazing. Is there THAT much money in rock radio in State College, PA? Or is this an outfit thinking that we're still in 1991?
 
You just lost the ten bucks. Qwik Rock's PM drive guy is full time as is his midday counterpart. But that's not the point and neither is whether the listener cares whether people are freelance or full time. This board isn't aimed at the general public, it's read by people with interest in or who are working in the industry.

And the original post about 3WZ wasn't about talk, but specifically about sports talk, it's plentiful availability around here and about taking a successful local full service format and turning it into another repeater for much of the day.

Where's tomorrow's training ground if not for places like State College? Where's any thought about creating something new or exciting or different? Who is grooming the people who will staff KYW or KFWB or WINS or WCBS in the future?

Today's station owners and cluster owners and chain owners better start looking for another industry, because radio's bleeding out.
 
I was in New York City and I heard a commercial advertising the exciting world of being an intern in the #1 radio market. Internships are where the next wave of radio broadcasters are coming from. Youtube is another source. This is no longer a business about working your way up to the big leagues. This is a business about finding the next overnight sensation. But it seems that radio is just reflecting the current world we live in.
 
WHY? Would you take THE #1 radio station in State College, PA and change the format?

First Media Inc. and / or Mike McGough really hit their heads on Mount Nittany!!!

Another radio station really ought to clean up, if they switched formats and became THE ONLY female oriented radio station in State College.

Better yet, if Magic 99 tweaked the format some... they could own the females.
 
State College hasn't been a rated market for three or four years now, so nobody has been #1 in a long time. Forever owns everything in the market, under one nameplate or the other, so what these guys do probably doesn't matter.

B-103 ("Beaver") was #1 in 12+ when Forever bought it, but then they flipped that to Quickrock, which rattled off about four #1 books in a row before they switched it to news-talk. I think that Quickrock 103.1 was the last Arbitron-rated #1 station in State College. Both B-103 and Quickrock were each rumored to be top-billers, so there must be more to the story than meets the eye. It is a very small market to have so many stations.

As far as women go, B-94.5, Magic, Bus and the two country frogs probably all have a share. But does it matter in a market with no ratings? It all boils down to one salesperson's story against another salesperson's story.
 
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